Local & State Headlines

City receives grant funding

• Albany is the recipient of almost $150,000 in grant money to be used for two projects.

Carlton Fletcher

J.D. Sumner

ALBANY — The city of Albany received word this week that it had been awarded grants that will help officials establish a pair of innovative programs.

The Georgia Department of Community Affairs awarded the city $137,222 in AmeriCorps program funding to help with the creation of a Police Cadet program, while the Georgia Forestry Commission will provide $7,200 in Urban & Community Forestry funding to help the city’s arborist complete a street tree inventory.

“This is certainly important news for the city and, I think, a direct spinoff benefit of my having served on the DCA board,” Albany Mayor Willie Adams, who has served as chair of the DCA for the past year, said of the AmeriCorps grant Friday. “I was aware that other cities had been awarded these grants, so I encouraged (Albany Police) Chief (James) Younger to submit an application.

“How the program will be established is left to the discretion of Chief Younger, but I feel that this is a positive step in helping our young people become law enforcers rather than law breakers.”

Albany AmeriCorps Program Coordinator Cpl. Denise Barnes with the APD said Friday that the grant money will be used to recruit high school graduates who “are interested in giving back to the community.”

“This gives us another tool to get out into neighborhoods, speak with our citizens and find out exactly what problems and issues they’re facing so that we can adjust our resources to best serve them,” Barnes said.

Barnes, who was a product of the AmeriCorps program when it was first introduced in Albany in the mid-1990s, said the first step will be to recruit 10 “passionate, professional, and dedicated individuals.”

“We’ll be taking applications and will pick the best 10 we can find, and then we’re going out into the community and will be knocking on doors to survey our citizens to find out their concerns,” she said.

The Albany AmeriCorps grant was one of 14 totaling $2,471,787 awarded to Georgia communities. AmeriCorps was created through the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 as a partnership between the federal government and state commissions to meet educational, environmental, public safety and helath care needs, to reward service and to build the ethics of citizens in participating communities.

The Urban & Community Firestry Grant, according to Albany Arborist Ili Si Malone, will help the city take a first step in developing a management plan for the city’s trees.

“(City Manager) Mr. (Alfred) Lott and the City Commission agreed to help fund the street tree inventory if we were awarded this grant,” Malone said. “Our goal is to not only complete the inventory, but also to learn the methodology so that we can teach it to others and to use it in developing a long-term management plan.

“There are a lot of square miles of trees in Albany, and for the purposes of this grant we intend to inventory downtown from West Roosevelt to West Whitney to the (Flint) river at Monroe. There are any number of uses such an inventory will provide, for our citizens and for future developers. A lot of people don’t understand the value of trees in a community ... their value can be measured in the millions and millions of dollars.”