By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Seeking to continue revitalizing Helper, the city continues to apply for grants year after year in the hopes of improving city infrastructure and sustainability. Two more grants recently entered the fray for Helper – an Outdoor Recreation Grant to aid in pool repairs and a grant from the Utah Department of Transportation to create a master transportation plan.

Helper City Mayor Lenise Peterman joined the KOAL newsroom to explain the purpose behind these grants and provide an in-depth look into how the application process functions.

Starting with the Outdoor Recreation Grant, the mayor explained,” That was the grant for the year. I’ve written so many that I wanted to win because the pool needs replastering and several other things. And when you talk about a project that’s $133,000, it’s a dent in a budget that you have to run a city. We only have $1.8 million. So these grants facilitate needed activities to keep maintenance up and keep things moving forward.”

Speaking on the UDOT grant, Peterman shared,” UDOT with this grant will come in and they’ll do some stakeholder meetings. So there’ll be community engagement and feedback, and they will be able to tell engineers, here’s what we’d like to see in our city in terms of mobility. And when I say mobility, I mean multimodal, not just cars, but biking and walking. So they will take that into account.”

She continued,” And then what they will do is develop a plan that I can then go to funders and say, ‘Hey, we have this project we want to do for walkability. Can you help pay for this?’ So, having the plan in hand is a key first step. We’ll be working with an engineering group that’s undetermined at this moment. But that’s how it will roll. And it will help us plan for growing community needs and having more people up and down our streets.”

Considering both grants, Mayor Peterman discussed the benefit she sees from the additional funding the grants provide: “I’ve often been asked, are you using grants as revenue? Grants are not revenue. They’re not in our budget. A grant to me is what I call a revenue igniter.” 

Peterman elaborated,” So when we do work at the pool, we’ll see more patrons at the pool, people coming in and they’re going to pay that nominal pool fee of three dollars to get in. They’ll probably buy a Diet Coke or something while they’re there. So, it ignites revenue streams. And the same thing will hold true with the transportation plan. It will allow us to plan for the future, but also to be able to get dollars to improve our roads and to create bike lanes if that’s what the community decides they want to do. So that’s what these grants serve. They ignite things in the community.”

Peterman explained the grant application process: ” The hardest step is finding the grant that fits your project needs. I am often asked, ‘Well, go write a grant for that.’ And I’m like, well, but there has to be a grant for that. So, matching the project’s needs to a funding source is the first step. Most of these grants nowadays are online. You have to have a login. So you have to be approved. There are usually steps you have to take where they say we don’t fund for-profit business, for example, or we don’t fund this. So if you are any of these things, you won’t be eligible to participate. So you go through a vetting process with most funders, but not all. And then they allow you into their grant portal, where you respond to questions that they have. They may want associated documents. A lot of them say, give me some support letters. If you’re doing this thing, tell me the community supports it, give us your budget and tell us what this project will cost. So a lot of work goes into the actual drafting of the grant and getting the supporting documentation for the grant and then obviously submitting it.”

Peterman added,” So when I go to council, typically, I need to let them know if I’m pursuing a grant that requires a matching fund. For example, I said the pool is a $133,000 project. We had budgeted $50,000 for the pool renovation and restoration. I used that as my match to the Outdoor Rec grant and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got $50,000; can you give me $83,000 as my match?’ And that’s how we get to that magic number of $133,000.”

Closing out our conversation, Mayor Peterman shared,” Just come out. We have a lot of events starting to fire up in Helper. We love to see visitors and locals at these events. So, just come by and say hi.”