Mar 19, 2021 2 min read

Greene County commissioners approved Thursday the construction of a new storage building at the fairgrounds.

The project was awarded to Blair Construction LLC for $247,000, which will come out of the county’s 2020 Act 13 money that was budgeted for 2021.

“We have been working on this for quite a while,” said Commissioner Mike Belding. “It will be used to store the conservation district’s rental equipment that they rent out to farmers, including a no-till grain drill and a lime fertilizer spreader.”

The commissioners also approved $5,000 of the Act 13 money to go toward assisting Carmichaels American Legion Post 400 pay for its new HVAC system.

“They had a failure of their HVAC system in their social hall,” Belding said. “It’s an unbudgeted emergency type of expenditure, and the county’s picking up half of it. The repairs have been done, but they’re trying to pay the invoice.”

Belding said that to his knowledge, this is the first of the Act 13 money the commissioners have agreed to spend so far this year. The county still has about $4.3 million in Act 13 funding that has not been allocated, he said.

“That money in the past has been used inefficiently and ineffectively,” Belding said. “One of our initiatives for this year is to use it as matching funds for grants and such, so we could potentially double our money. You end up with twice as much getting accomplished.”