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Forest, Parks & Recreation details grant pipeline; competitive community grants took average 98 days to execute
Summary
Department staff described the multi-step grant agreement process, program volumes and a case study showing an average 98-day execution time for FY2023 community grants, and flagged volunteer capacity, permitting and equipment restrictions as recurring drivers of delay.
Lauren Pyle, outdoor recreation grants manager for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation (FPR), told the House Government Operations & Military Affairs Committee on April 2 that FPR administers a mix of state and federal grant programs and that competitive community grants often require substantial back-and-forth with applicants before an executed agreement is possible.
“I run the outdoor recreation programs within that, which is almost half of this portfolio,” Pyle said, describing FPR’s caseload. She said FPR had about 109 active community grants with roughly $20,000,000 in state awards at the moment, and that the department also administers 12 federal grant programs with about 71 subrecipients representing roughly $7,300,000.
Pyle described the department’s Voorhek Community Grant Program (Voorhek, the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative), which she said has awarded about $11,000,000 to 84 grantees since 2019. In the 2023 competitive round she described — applications opened in October 2023 — FPR selected 51 projects and moved most of them into grant agreements before the end of the fiscal…
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