OBSERVER Photo by Greg Fox After receiving money for Barker Common’s revitalization, the village of Fredonia hopes to continue collecting state funding to spruce up the downtown area through a grant program geared toward local businesses — the New York Main Street program.

On the heels of the Barker Common revitalization grant’s procurement, village of Fredonia officials hope to continue collecting state money for sprucing up the downtown area through the New York Main Street program.

Mayor Athanasia Landis and the trustees discussed the grant program during recent village board meetings. Landis noted she hopes to secure $20,000 in technical assistance money to help carry out the footwork for the actual application formulation process.

“This is a grant that the village will not have anything to do with except facilitate it because the money is going to be spent and refunded to individual business owners,” she explained. “But, before you apply actually for the grant, these business owners have to be contacted, have to be informed, have to come up with a plan, and this is a quite broad and tedious and kind of difficult process.”

The mayor pointed out the state has about $200,000 for technical assistance associated with the Main Street grant. That money is disbursed on a first-come, first-served basis, with the village chipping in $1,000 for the local share.

The grant program reimburses 75 percent of each business owner’s expenses, Landis mentioned.

Examples of what the technical assistance could be used for include downtown building inventories, design guidelines, architectural assessments, economic revitalization and marketing strategies, facade studies, building-specific renovation plans and development and reuse strategies. Once the money is received, the village can hire an agency to carry out some of these ideas.

According to the grant program website, Main Street grants help with improvements such as facade renovations, interior commercial and residential building upgrades and streetscape enhancements. Funds are not available for building demolition or new construction.

“In cooperation with business owners, with the community and with the board, we can decide exactly what we want and how we want to proceed,” Landis concluded.

The board will likely consider a resolution to move forward with the grant program in the near future.

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