It looks like there will be some money for the city’s Select Neighborhood Action Program grants in this year’s tight budget, but only half what neighborhood groups have gotten for small improvement projects in the recent past.

Just $25,000 is recommended for this year, and the application deadline is being moved from June to September, after the start of the new fiscal year, city Neighborhood Action Coordinator Karen Foley told city commissioners at their nonvoting work session Tuesday afternoon.

“That’s a lot tighter than we’ve had in the past, and we’ve been telling people ‘no’ in the past,” she said.

The city has handed out small grants – maximum $5,000 – for neighborhood projects for a decade. In that time they’ve given $565,000 to 59 groups, mostly voluntary neighborhood associations or mandatory homeowners associations, Foley said. The money has been used for a wide variety of work: landscaping, decorative signs, curbs, entrance markers, lights and more.

Commissioner Bruce Wilkerson said that in prioritizing this year’s list of requests – since more applications always come in than there’s money to fulfill – he would favor ideas that fix physical problems over beautification efforts.

Commissioner Brian “Slim” Nash wondered if Foley would ask neighborhood groups’ opinion of a “radical” idea: forgoing SNAP grants for a year, in exchange for work on the former Cabell Drive fire station.

In 2006, neighborhood groups asked that the old fire station be turned into a community center, with offices, a kitchen and a large meeting room. The city looked favorably on the idea, but it was put off by last year’s budget cuts. In July, the city estimated it would take $200,000 to $300,000 to do the work.

The former fire station at 1117 Cabell Drive was built in 1954, then turned into office space by the Warren County Extension Service in the 1980s. Later it was turned back over to the city and used for storage.

If renovated, the building would not only be a home for local neighborhood organizations, but rental of its office space might generate some income for those groups, Nash said.

Mayor Elaine Walker thought that idea worth exploring, too, and Foley said she’d ask. Walker said she’d like to see SNAP funding go back up to $50,000 a year when the economy, and therefore the city budget, improves.

Methane sale

Another idea that floated at the work session involves finding a profitable use for the methane gas emitted by two of the city’s closed landfills. City Manager Kevin DeFebbo said the landfills, in Morgantown and on Glen Lily Road, do vent methane, a greenhouse gas; but its greenhouse effects dissipate if the methane is burned off.

About six months ago, a company approached the city about “harvesting” methane, burning it and selling that reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to another company, allowing the buyer to emit more greenhouse gases, DeFebbo said. The vendor would bear the costs of developing the idea, and split the proceeds with the city, he said.

Whether it’s feasible is unknown, but early estimates say the city might make $80,000 a year, DeFebbo said.

“That’s better than nothing,” he said.

Commissioner Joe Denning asked what effect this would have on a development proposal raised late last year for the Morgantown landfill.

The city owns 60 acres of forested land next to the landfill site, and Owl’s Head Alloys asked to buy that land as a site to store its waste aluminum, salts, oxides and dust. That raised objections from government officials in Morgantown and Butler County, who said the 1977 landfill contract gave them first option to buy that land, which now sits across Hwy. 70 from Butler County’s industrial park.

DeFebbo said interest in the Owl’s Head deal “seems to have expired on both sides,” but Denning asked him to check this new idea with Morgantown just in case.