Forest, Parks & Recreation details grant pipeline; competitive community grants took average 98 days to execute

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 year.

Pyle walked the committee through the department’s multi-step process: notification to selected applicants; collection of compliance documents (W-9s, certificates of insurance, Act 154 good standing, risk-assessment questionnaires); federal and state debarment checks; business-office review and vendor setup; drafting and iterating the scope of work and reporting metrics; local authorizing votes where needed; legal review when projects introduced novel contract language; and final business-office processing and signatures. She said FPR typically asks for some compliance materials only after selection so that applicants do not face unnecessary application burden.

Timing details and constraints: Pyle said the time between selection and executed agreement varied widely. For the 51 projects in the 2023 round, she said the department’s average time to execution was 98 days; one all-volunteer flood-recovery grantee took 117 days from selection to an executed agreement. Pyle attributed long timelines primarily to applicant capacity (volunteer-led organizations versus professionally staffed nonprofits), delays obtaining landowner permissions, the need for revised maps or permitting documentation, and the time it takes grantees to secure multiple quotes or permits.

Pyle said the department’s ranking committee will sometimes scale awards or ask that applicants contract out restricted equipment purchases rather than buy durable equipment. She gave a concrete example: a volunteer-led group requested funding to purchase an excavator as part of a $116,000 flood-recovery project; the ranking committee instead approved partial funding and directed the applicant to contract excavation work because state rules restrict equipment purchased with grant funds to grant-related uses for the life of the asset.

Financial operations: Ansley Bloomer, FPR’s director of finance and administration, told the committee that FPR’s grants portfolio is roughly $70,000,000 (about $50,000,000 federal and $21,000,000 state) and that the business office processes roughly 400–500 subrecipient reimbursement payments annually. Bloomer said FPR’s internal review found a typical end-to-end processing time of about 10 days from submission to payment in many cases, with the business office component often taking about two days; but she noted real-world snags — missing W-9s, address mismatches, missing programmatic reports, staff turnover, and fiscal-year pauses — that can lengthen the timeline.

Bloomer also told the committee that a forthcoming Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system will replace Vision and VTHR and should reduce manual friction, vendor setup delays and other process bottlenecks.

Why it matters: the department said that coaching and technical assistance during agreement development allows the state to fund strong community projects that may not submit “perfect” applications, but that the hands-on approach requires staff capacity. Pyle said her team ran the 2023 round with one full-time and one half-time program staff member and two business-office staff handling the volume, and that meeting competitive timelines requires balancing applicant burden against the program’s reach.

Ending: Pyle and Bloomer told the committee they would continue to share operational details and that FPR is available for follow-up as the legislature considers statutory changes affecting the grant-making process.