I would recommend that the Mayor and Town Council consider hiring a professional grant writer, preferably on contract to help finance town improvements and to free up department heads to attend to their pressing day-to-day matters serving the people of Fountain Hills.
Simply put, a grant writer gathers documentation to fulfil the necessary requirements of various funding bodies to formally seek funding for our town’s capital improvement projects. The grant writer must have excellent communication and research skills, should be able to effectively communicate in both written and verbal skills and write up and submit grant proposals.
Currently those duties fall on the Town’s department heads. Grant writing is a difficult and time-consuming job. I believe our department heads would benefit from having this tedious duty outsourced to a professional grant writer.
I do not feel hiring a grant writer is warranted without having a trial period and conducting a cost benefit analysis after a specified period. After hiring an independent contractor – say, for example, two years – we could then assess to see if the benefit in successful grants being awarded to our town was worth the expense.
The grant writer would apply for various grants, follow through with additional information required by agencies to which we applied and report to the department heads, mayor and Town Council. I believe there are many opportunities to be awarded grants and fund projects, we are simply missing out on them because we do not have a specialist doing our bidding.
The grant writer would allow us to get things done and the town would not have to pay them back. That’s called a win/win. The positive economic impact to our town could be substantial. Why not give it try?
