Posted on June 1, 2016
At BG Consultants, we make it a habit to go above and beyond for all of our clients. As a result, we have a lot of expertise and service that we don’t have official titles for. And while we don’t want to give away any trade secrets, we do want people to know what makes BG great.
One of our value-added areas of expertise is grant funding. Many engineering projects that deal with infrastructure, especially those in low to moderate income communities, depend upon grants for funding. Without grants, communities would be forced to significantly raise utility rates by obscene amounts in order to finance local projects.
While BG engineers can’t write or administer grants themselves, our thorough, up-to-date knowledge of grant funding makes us better suited to design according to grant requirements and present recommendations that align with the latest grant opportunities. In other words, we try to make grant procurement as easy as possible for our clients, and we have a proven track record of doing just that.
Because funding opportunities and requirements are always changing, we make it a priority to maintain personal relationships with grant funding agencies and attend funding agency workshops whenever possible. Plus, we have engineers like Brian Kingsley, who went so far as to become a certified grant administrator. Although he can’t administrator grants for BG, the engineering we do requires careful attention to details of the grant requirements if we want our clients to receive funding.
Kingsley says he took the training “to be more familiar with requirements and what the administrator would need from me to make the process more efficient.”
“A lot of people in our company have that intimate knowledge,” he says.
That knowledge not only allows us to make the design process more efficient, but also to communicate more clearly to our clients about grant requirements and opportunities.
“We strive to ‘make it easy’ for the client,” Kingsley says.
Some of the main sources of funding for communities include the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), and grants from United States Department of Agriculture and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.