Tippecanoe Township officials are looking to upgrade equipment and other needs and the Marshall County Commissioners agreed to help with the process.
Tippecanoe Township Trustee Matt Pitney expressed concern to the commissioners Monday morning about the township’s aging fire trucks and dilapidated building.
“The fire truck and the fire tanker are over 30-plus years old – all of our trucks are failing. Our fire station is part of the old school that has been kind of retrofitted. We’re parking fire trucks on top of a basement of the old school. We’ve spent endless hours repairing things ourselves trying to save the township some money,” said Pitney.
Pitney explained that the township does not benefit from a large tax base as it does not have an incorporated town or city within the township. It’s one of the lowest funded townships in the county.
Because of that, one of the members of the Tippecanoe Township Improvement Association contacted Grant Writer Shannon McLeod from Priority Resources, Inc. to help get started in moving the township forward with improvements. She explained that a planning grant through the Office of Community and Rural Affairs would give officials a chance to work with a planner and architect to put together a comprehensive study.
“It’s scaled back obviously because they don’t have the water and sewer infrastructure in place,” said McLeod. It would look at kind of giving them a comprehensive overview of what’s here, what needs to be improved, and how they might go about prioritizing that and then matching up long-term goals with funding to try to get some of that accomplished over the next five to ten years.”
The commissioners unanimously agreed to be the sponsor of the grant. The township will put forth matching funds totaling $8,500 for a $40,000 planning grant. The grant application will be submitted next month.
