School district seeks EPA resiliency grant to build community commercial kitchen and emergency hub

Kristin Neerot, superintendent and principal of the local school district, told the Benton County advisory committee that the district has applied for an EPA resiliency-hub grant and is pursuing a standalone commercial kitchen and community resiliency hub on school property.

Neerot said the district submitted its resiliency-hub application in November and asked the panel to consider the project as a community asset. "We would actually have a commercial working kitchen that could be used to do mass quantities of food," Neerot said. She described the building as intended both for regular school use and for community events or emergency response.

The district estimates the new kitchen-and-commons building would allow the school to cook at scale and expand food storage beyond the current three- to four-day supply. Neerot said the school can house up to about 1,000 people in normal emergency sheltering arrangements but currently lacks the cooking capacity to feed that many. "If there were no power and it happened last year around this time, there were people who didn't have power for seven days that we could still provide hot meals, hot showers. We would have solar power," she told the committee.

Neerot presented a cost picture and funding plan: the district has drawn preliminary plans and estimates the standalone building would cost roughly $3 million to $3.5 million in the current design, and that the estimate might be trimmed to about $2.5 million–$3 million with resiliency grant funding. She said the district requested about $7,000,000 from the EPA program as part of a broader $15 million–$20 million financing package across partners. Neerot said the Benton Community Foundation and the Ford Family Foundation have discussed contributions in the low hundreds of thousands — she cited potential support "about 400 to 500,000" from each — and the district has committed funds to planning.

The proposal includes infrastructure for emergency power and longer-term food storage, and a plan to remodel an existing play-shed into separated housing and shower space so evacuees could be sheltered apart from students if the school must continue classes while people are housed on site. Neerot said the resiliency grant would also support generator and solar installations to extend operations during multi-day outages and add showers and locker rooms to allow multi-day sheltering.

Neerot framed the project as doubling as a community resource for events, agricultural processing and school programs: a larger kitchen would support a broader summer meal program and local farm-to-school purchases, and she said earlier local partnerships had supplied meat and produce to school programs in other districts. She told the advisory committee the district had applied for other state seismic grants for unrelated remodeling and that the resiliency grant remains the lynchpin for the full scope.

Committee members and staff asked procedural and technical questions about siting, power and grant timing. Neerot said the district is continuing to pursue other grants and local fundraising if the EPA award is delayed or reduced, and asked the committee for help with letters of support or local fundraising connections.

The presentation closed with committee members offering technical help and Neerot inviting follow-up contact by phone or email.

Provenance: Excerpts of the district presentation and grant discussion appear in the meeting transcript beginning at 00:29:03 (Kristin Neerot speaks on building purpose and capacity) and continuing through 00:53:42 (discussion of grants, cost estimates, and community uses).