Baltimore County Planning unveils final and quarterly grant reporting forms for grantees

At a county webinar, Amy Menzer, senior project manager with the Baltimore County Department of Planning, and Tom Sohetsky, a grants monitoring staff member, introduced two new grant-reporting forms for organizations that receive county funding: a final reporting form and a quarterly reporting form.

The county said the final reporting form will be required when a grant ends and must be submitted within 30 days after the end date in the executed grant agreement. For grants that extend into 2026 and beyond, grantees will also be required to file quarterly progress reports; those reports are due the first day of the second month after the close of each quarter (for example, a quarter ending March 31 has a due date of May 1). Menzer said the county manages grants for more than 70 organizations and well over 100 projects and that the reporting changes are intended to ensure stewardship of public funds and to support future funding requests.

The county walked attendees through the fields and file types grantees must provide. Both forms begin with five standard questions: official legal organization name (the county will use exact names to match records), mailing address, primary contact, phone number and email. The final report asks for detailed documentation of expenses: grantees must upload a single PDF that includes invoices and proof of payment (bank statement or evidence that a credit-card bill was paid) and indicate the page number within that PDF where each expense is documented. Menzer said: "We are asking you to put your official legal organization name into this field. The way these results come in is as an Excel sheet, so we want to make sure we can use the match function to match all the grants and all the reports you submitted."

Both forms also collect project location data for an interactive county map. Staff demonstrated an option to click a map location that returns latitude and longitude or to paste an address; the forms currently accept only one location field per reported project, and grantees with multiple project sites will be asked to paste additional latitude/longitude entries into a text box and label them.

The county requires photo documentation. The forms include separate upload fields for "before" and "current/finished" images. Image fields accept JPEG or PNG files; written deliverables such as studies or reports are uploaded into a separate document field that accepts PDFs, Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Menzer said the form’s instructions ask grantees to label uploaded files with the organization name, grant year and project name to make county processing easier.

For quarterly reports the county created an expense-tracking spreadsheet template. Tom Sohetsky demonstrated the template, which shows the date funds were received, quarter-by-quarter expense entries and automatic calculations of quarterly expenditures and remaining grant balances. Sohetsky said quarterly submissions generally will not require proof of payment; the county will request supporting documentation only at the final report. He added, however, that large grants that have not been fully dispersed may trigger earlier documentation requirements before additional funds are released.

Menzer and Sohetsky described timing and review expectations. Final reports are due 30 days after the grant end date listed in the grant agreement. Sohetsky said the county will attempt to confirm receipt and whether a submission is complete “within a week” but that actual review times will depend on staff workload. The presenters asked grantees to notify staff early if projects will miss their grant end date; requests to extend an agreement should be routed to county staff and processed as amendments to the grant agreement.

Staff addressed a few attendee questions during the session. On the relationship between county reporting and other agency reporting, Sohetsky said reporting to the county is separate: "our reporting is not kind of lined up with the county DHCV," and grantees should submit county reports independently of other agency reporting requirements. Menzer offered to follow up by email where grant types or dates were unclear and noted staff would send the quarterly-report templates to organizations whose grants extend into 2026. She also encouraged grantees to contact staff for technical assistance or permitting help if projects encounter implementation obstacles.

The county said instructions and the forms will be shared by email and that staff will begin sending quarterly-report templates to affected grantees. Menzer closed the webinar by reiterating staff availability to troubleshoot submissions and to help ensure projects stay on track.