Warden denied Public Works Board funding

WARDEN — City Administrator Kriss Shuler announced during Tuesday’s regular city council meeting that Warden was denied grant funding from the Washington State Public Works Board for $9.8 million for this round of applications.

“We applied for funding for some of our infrastructure programs and we did not make the cut yet,” Shuler said. “They funded 61 projects. We were number 69 on the list, so we missed it by a little bit.”

The council approved the application at the end of June and the city applied for the funding in July. Since Warden is considered a distressed community, they were eligible for up to half of the funding in the form of grants rather than loans, as well as a reduced interest rate for any loans.

The application targeted three renovation projects in Warden, including renovations of a booster pumping station, a project improving Warden’s east and west water main connection and a project replacing the city’s outdated steel water lines. Shuler said the booster is their main priority.

“It's not failing to work at all. It does work,” Shuler said. “It is that pumps are not working to the best capacity and the roof does need some repairs, so we may be doing some intermittent repairs until we do have funding.”

The PWB met with city staff Thursday for a debrief on the funding denial.

“Their review of our application was they could not determine from the application of those three different types of projects that we had how they were connected,” Shuler said. “We didn't provide a good enough explanation how they were connected or if they were actually three separate projects. Their recommendation is either to define them as three separate projects or to put them in separate applications.”

When discussing the last round of applications, the council debated whether to only apply for one or two projects to increase the odds of obtaining funding, or to apply for all three at once to get the most out of the request and show that the city has more need for funding.

The city will not be able to apply for the same grant until the next round of funding applications, which Shuler said will be in April, and will be in a new format. She said city staff and city council will have to decide the best way to apply for the three projects given the new format and the recommendation of the Public Works Board, and how to group the projects or separate them if need be.

Shuler said the PWB was very positive about what they saw of the projects.

“We just have to find a better way to provide the scoring team a clearer picture of what the projects are,” she said.

The city meets the threshold for points in the PWB’s scoring system, Shuler said, the city just wasn’t high enough on the list to receive funding. She said the PWB had requests for $312 million in funding across the state and awarded $221 million.

The city could potentially find other funding for the projects.

“We always are watching for funders that put out funding, so if there are other sources available to apply for, we will do so,” Shuler said.

Other business at the city council meeting included unanimously authorizing Mayor Tony Massa to sign a contract for on-call hearing examiner services with Andy Kottkamp of Kottkamp, Yedinak & Esworthy attorneys at law. Shuler also announced that the council will be holding a public hearing Oct. 24 for the city’s property tax levy for 2024.

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Davis lives in Othello with his family.