Lewisville City Council provides direction on future of neighborhood grants

Lewisville Leader
By Arianna Morrison | Star Local Media
May 2, 2023

Lewisville City Council met on Monday, May 1 to receive an update on neighborhood grants in the city and provide direction for the future of the programs.

The city currently has five active grant programs, the Property Enhancement Program, Love Your Block, the Neighborhood Enhancement Program, PEP Plus, and Code Abatement. The Property Enhancement Program is the city’s most successful program with 256 grants awarded totalling $588,741.17 since 2016.

The city also has an upcoming Minor Housing Rehab Program, which will come this year.

When it comes to Love Your Block, it is a $500 reimbursable grant for neighborhoods and all about encouraging neighborhoods to build community.

“So far, we’ve done 13 grants and they’ve all been very specific to neighborhood parties,” said Ashleigh Feryan, neighborhood services manager for the City of Lewisville. “If you wanted to have a block party, you could use these funds for food, bounce houses, face painting and of those 13 grants, 11 of them also had our Rock the Block trailer, which is free for people to reserve.”

For the Neighborhood Enhancement Program, it is a 50% reimbursable grant of up to $12,500 and the goal is to revitalize neighborhoods. So far, four projects have been awarded this year, with three completed and one under construction. The completed projects totaled $42,654.01 and the project under construction was awarded $12,500.

The PEP allows for up to 50% reimbursable grant for homeowners doing exterior work on single family homes. All homeowners are eligible and for those that qualify as low-to-moderate income, up to $5,000 can be rewarded and for any homeowner, up to $1,000 can be rewarded.

As part of the “Listen. Learn. Lead.,” a recommendation that came from that was to collect and maintain statistics on racial, ethnic, and age breakdown for neighborhood grand recipients, and use the data to determine strategies for reaching underrepresented segments of the community.

“With the PEP applicants, a majority are white and non-Hispanic, so as we start to build our other programs, we will begin to collect this information as well,” Feryan said. “45% of our PEP applicants have been low-to-moderate income and 11% have been disabled and 36% of all of our applicants have been 62 years old or older.”

The Minor Housing Rehabilitation Program is specifically funded through the Community Development Block Grant while all of the other programs have been generally funded. This program is specific to low-to-moderate income homeowners and is dedicated for HVAC and necessary electrical work. This city will pay the contractor directly up to $15,000 and guidelines for this program are currently in legal review.

Lewisville City Council directed that the PEP Plus program go citywide for homes built in 1980 or older and that the city pay the contractor directly for Code Abatement.