Balancing Act

We thought we would initiate a Frequently Asked Questions column in our newsletter to answer those questions often posed to us by both our customers and potential customers. For this column, we decided to address questions regarding a community's ability/eligibility in handling one or more grants and, secondly, Thoma Development Consultants' ability to write and administer a number of grants for a variety of customers at the same time. We hope our readers will find this new column informative.

Is our community able to handle more than one grant at a time? Is our community eligible to apply for and receive concurrently running grant programs?

Yes, the number of projects or programs a community can undertake at one time is limited only by local capacity and desire. A community has the ability to apply for and receive as many grants as it can handle. Typically, one funding source does not contact other funding sources to find out the number of grant projects a community has pending or in the works. Occasionally, if an application lists more than one source of public funding, this may trigger a discussion between funding sources, but this consultation will not be an issue that limits the number of grants awarded.

Concurrently running grants are typical among our customers. One of our medium sized village customers had water and sewer projects, a downtown façade program, two target area housing rehabilitation programs, and a tree planting program all operating at the same time. There were four different funding sources involved. To be this successful in capturing grant funds is a very good thing, but a community must weigh the impact of undertaking more than one grant program or project. For example, the commitment of municipal staff time is a factor in determining the number of projects a municipality can handle simultaneously, as is the availability of matching funds.

Sometimes it makes sense to delay a grant application for a year or two to ensure the community has the capacity to carry out one or more projects in a timely fashion rather than run the risk of a poor performance. Past performance is a significant criterion in judging a community's capacity to handle additional grant awards from the same funding source. We at Thoma are working harder than ever to ensure that each grant program is progressing on schedule. Sometimes, however, there are extenuating factors that are out of our control. For example, if a funding source has significant lag time between submittal of the application and grant award, between grant award and the signing of a grant agreement, or if eligible program participants are slow to apply for a program, this can slow performance. If a community's existing grant is not on schedule, we may make a strong recommendation to our customer to delay the submission of back-to-back applications. This gives the community some time to rectify the program delay, usually with the blessing of the funding source, and it usually eliminates a negative past performance rating.

Does Thoma have the capacity to concurrently write and administer a number of grants for a variety of customers? Does this affect customer service?

Thoma is proud of the fact that we are able to balance the needs of all our customers at the same time without sacrificing individualized attention. We are able to do this because we have customized computer programs to assist in this endeavor, and, most importantly, we have a well-trained staff with many years of experience in handling multiple projects at the same time. An added benefit of our exposure to so many communities is that we are able to share the best practices found in one community with all our other customers. Because our workload has increased significantly, especially over the last five years, we have hired six new staff persons to make sure our customers get the level of service they deserve. In an effort to ensure efficiency, we divided our staff into two “teams”: one for writing grants and developing projects and programs and another team for handling the programs we administer. We handle many grant writing, research, feasibility studies, planning projects, home inspections, lead testing, etc., work all at the same time. It is our goal to make each customer feel as though, “we just work for them”.

We at Thoma want to assure our customers that they are very capable of handling multiple projects at the same time if they so desire. Because Thoma has many years of experience performing our “balancing act”, we are more than happy to assist our customers in balancing their community development projects.