Ronan hopes for funds to improve streets, sewer

RONAN — Ronan city officials are looking to federal stimulus dollars and the Legislature to help fund projects that would improve 3rd Avenue and the city’s sewer lift station.

As Montana legislators supposedly pound out the final details of the budget including House Bill 645, the bill allotting more than $800 million in federal stimulus money, local county, city and town officials statewide stand ready with their wish lists in hand waiting for word to whether they will receive their slice of the $20 million discretionary funds pie to complete planned infrastructure improvement projects.

Ronan Mayor Kim Aipperspach is hopeful that approval for Ronan’s  proposed chunk will come through any day now.

“When we get done with budget every year we’re spent,” Aipperspach said. “We don’t have any sort of discretionary funds like this to spend usually, and we’re trying to stretch it as far as we can.”

The mayor said that last month his council was notified that it may be entitled to its piece of the $20 million pie. The catch? They had roughly a day and a half to pull together an eligible “shovel-ready” infrastructure project to meet the deadline for the Legislature’s stimulus funding process. “Shovel ready,” also being an obstacle, means that the project is to be ready for contract bidding by mid-June.

It was then city officials threw 3rd Avenue’s hat in the ring, a well-traveled local road along the schools that is in need of some repair. The mayor said that the decision was arrived at due to the fact that the road has a good, solid base-level foundation underneath the street and would only need the patch work repairs and overlay on top to get it back into prime condition.

Aipperspach explained that the stimulus-funded repairs will extend almost all the way to the highway, where the summer’s highway improvement project will patch the rest. All in all, the 3rd Avenue repair project is estimated to cost $41,463.

That may not be all Ronan is getting in the way of stimulus dollars however. The city is also in the process of combining grant money and a loan to fund some necessary re-vamping of the town’s sewer lift station — a project estimated to cost in the ballpark of $150,000. This project is also in the bidding to receive stimulus funding to cover half of the loan’s cost.

“It’s too early to tell right now as we haven’t seen a 100 percent ‘yes’ on either project yet, so all of this could change in a couple days,” Aipperspach added.