County commissioners voted to sponsor an application to the Office of Community and Rural Affairs that would let the Turkey Creek Regional Sewer District seek a roughly $560,000 grant to repair aging water infrastructure.

The sponsorship clears the way for a grant proposal due Oct. 24 and a full application by Dec. 19, county staff said, and would make the county the formal applicant and subrecipient under OCRA rules. The county’s endorsement was unanimous.

The project is intended to fund a roughly $700,000 package of work that would install a new distribution system in the Fascination Place subdivision, meter properties in the nearby Enchanted Hills area, install a permanent standby generator and drill a new production well, Shannon McCleod of Baker Tilly told commissioners. Turkey Creek already received a $4.5 million grant from the Indiana Finance Authority’s State Revolving Fund for replacement of other system components.

“This is to make sure we keep this utility up and running,” Jeff Hirscha of Jones & Henry, the district’s engineering firm, told the commissioners, noting the district’s inherited water system is beyond its design life. “We identified approximately $11,000,000 worth of improvements that needed to be made.”

Under OCRA rules a city, town or county must apply on behalf of utilities that cannot be the applicant themselves; McCleod said the county currently has room under OCRA’s limit on open grants to be a sponsor. She asked the county to authorize an income survey and to allow county staff to receive environmental-review letters on the county’s behalf as part of the application process.

Commissioners were briefed on the timeline: proposal due Oct. 24, full application Dec. 19, awards likely announced in February, and, if funded, construction could start by mid-summer the following year. McCleod said the OCRA-funded work would be bid quickly because planning work is already under way for the SRF-funded project.

Commissioners asked county staff to provide a letter authorizing the income survey and environmental-review outreach; the county’s community coordinator and county attorney were copied on next steps. The motion to endorse sponsorship passed unanimously.

Details provided at the meeting show the Turkey Creek water utility serves about 200 customers and that the Fascination Place distribution system is made of aging asbestos-cement pipe that county engineers said is beyond design life.

If awarded, the county would enter a state grant agreement and a subrecipient agreement with Turkey Creek spelling out responsibilities for administration and construction oversight. The county did not commit dollars; McCleod said OCRA would supply the local match the district needs for the $700,000 scope.

Commissioners said they supported the effort so long as it would not exhaust the county’s capacity to apply for other OCRA grants.