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Board outlines $500,000 pilot RFA with upfront payments, equipment focus and eligibility guardrails
Summary
At a working session, the API board discussed a draft request-for-applications for a $500,000 pilot fund to support agriculture, food systems and forest-products infrastructure. Members favored upfront (non-reimbursement) payments, debated applicant eligibility and proposed a broad $1,000–$50,000 request range with scoring to prioritize smaller awards.
The API board met by Zoom to flesh out a strawman request-for-applications (RFA) for a $500,000 pilot intended to fund targeted, short-term infrastructure projects in agriculture, food systems and forest products.
Staff member Lily presented the draft RFA and emphasized that the pilot’s main purpose is to test grant design and gather data to shape a fully capitalized fund. “Once again, as I mentioned, there's 500,000,” Lily said, framing the pilot as limited money that should be targeted to high-impact, measurable projects with a suggested 12–18 month period of performance.
Board members coalesced around several principles during a wide-ranging discussion. Panelists repeatedly said grants should be accessible and not require applicants to front significant cash. Claire, summarizing a small-group report, said “upfront payments are vital” and argued that reimbursement-only models would re-create capital-access barriers for small operations.
On award size and tiering, the group favored simplicity. Several members proposed a single application window for requests up to $50,000 with a proposed minimum in the low thousands; one board member suggested a $1,000 floor and scoring that favors smaller requests rather than rigid funding tiers. “Transparency with applicants is really important,” said Alex, urging clarity about how applicants would compete within any tiers.
Eligibility and program intent drew sustained debate. Staff and members discussed whether applicants must be ‘‘Maine-based’’ businesses, how many years an operation must have been active, and whether prior recipients of DACF grants should be excluded. The board discussed and recorded an initial preference that applicants not have received a DACF grant within the last three years and explored business-age thresholds ranging from 18 months to three years. Members also discussed employee-count thresholds and weighed Maine statute language (which cites 100 employees in some contexts) against an SBA 250-employee standard; the conversation preserved flexibility for staff drafting the final rules.
Members cautioned against strict ‘‘Maine-grown’’ input requirements for all grant types. Forestry speakers stressed that equipment, contractors and products often cross state lines, and several members said a hard percentage requirement could unduly restrict viable projects. Instead, the board favored scoring or prioritizing projects that rely heavily on Maine inputs without making a strict cutoff mandatory for eligibility.
The group agreed on other guiding points: allow equipment and related costs (installation, delivery, tariff impacts) as allowable expenses; accept facility upgrades and small infrastructure where appropriate; include priority consideration for projects that provide shared use or measurable resilience; and avoid making innovation or high-tech solutions a scoring priority for this initial pilot round.
Staff described a two-step review process: a technical evaluation committee comprised of DACF staff and external industry experts to score applications, with final applicants presented to the board for a ‘‘yay or nay’’ recommendation before submission to the commissioners for a final decision.
No final, formal RFA was adopted at the meeting. Lily said staff will take the board’s feedback, finalize draft rules and the RFA over December, and return with a proposed document for further review and approval. “I’ll take everybody’s feedback and I’ll really start finalizing the rules and RFA,” Lily said.
The board also signaled a policy preference to make grants accessible to historically underserved applicants by using statutory definitions and simple self-identification checkboxes within the RFA. Members noted the statute’s intent to prioritize veterans, communities with generational poverty, people of color and tribal communities.
Next steps: staff will circulate meeting notes and request one-on-one follow-ups to clarify points raised in discussion. Staff aims to finalize RFA language in December and reconvene the board in late January for further review and stakeholder listening, possibly tied to an agricultural trade show.
The board’s discussion produced a clear template for the pilot but left several technical details—exact minimum award, final operational age threshold and final employee-size threshold—to staff rulemaking and subsequent board review.
