The city of Aberdeen may be able to recoup some of its costs in purchasing a new location for the Aberdeen Museum of History thanks to an upcoming grant cycle.

In a special meeting of the Aberdeen City Council on March 30, the council approved Aberdeen Parks & Recreation Director Stacie Barnum to submit an application for a Capital Heritage Grant to partially cover $616,500 in expenses.

The Heritage Capital Projects Fund provides state funding for heritage building projects, such as new facilities, renovations of existing ones, and maintenance of historic structures. The grant would cover one-third of the city’s costs for the new museum location.

The council authorized Barnum to apply for a Capital Heritage Grant for the 2023-25 Funding Biennium in the amount of $616,500, which would equate to $203,445 in state funding and $411,021 in matching funds from the city. The grant is intended to cover the purchase of the old Salvation Army building in downtown Aberdeen, which was purchased for approximately $375,000 after closing costs.

The grant is also intended to cover initial engineering and planning costs to prepare the building to house the collection, such as the hiring of a construction project manager to oversee building and permitting.

“These are very long programs. At the end of the day what happens is that the city spends the money and the project is reimbursed as we go,” said Aberdeen Board of Museum and History President John Shaw. “We would be eligible immediately for acquisition costs for that building, because the program would allow you to go back and bring forward previous expenditures.”

According to Shaw, who has worked with Capital Heritage Grants at the Westport Maritime Museum, once buildings and projects are approved for one Capital Heritage Grant, they are often successful in future cycles.

The grant may lessen the blow of the nearly $5,000 a month Aberdeen has been paying to house the museum collection in the Port Industrial Area, but the approximately $200,000 in funding barely makes a dent in overall construction costs. According to an assessment made earlier this year by Rock Project Management Services, it will cost the city nearly $1.6 million to bring the building up to par. This includes $1.25 million in direct construction costs and $352,000 in management and other costs.

Earlier plans to cover a wider array of project costs with the grant were considered, but ultimately thrown out by the Finance Committee of the Aberdeen City Council before being presented to the council as a whole.

“We’ve been talking about applying for Capital Heritage eligibility and grant cycle, and city staff presented two options to the museum board: an application for only the amount of the purchase of the building, or a higher amount — $1.65 million — which would be for the value of the building, the value of A&E for planning, and the amount that the city was estimating would be required to get the building up to full engagement,” said Shaw.

According to Shaw, the board’s request to set the project on the path toward full community engagement fell on deaf ears when the request that went to the finance committee was reduced to the amount of initial purchase, engineering, and planning.

“The amount that is before us today is based on what would start the process for the architecture and engineering phase of the project, which will really then give us a tighter budget, and prioritization, and better information for then making decisions down the road, how much they’re going to cost and where those monies might come from that again provide us with a better leverage so that not so much of the city’s capital is expended all at once,” said Councilperson Liz Ellis in the special meeting.

The reduced grant application may help stakeholders prioritize renovations and a vision for the future museum, but it will also leave the city available to try and cover project costs through grants that offer better price matches than the 33 percent of the Capital Heritage Grant.

“We already bought the building. If we apply for this grant, we’re gonna get reimbursed for a third of it, while not giving up other opportunities to pursue funding grants. So, why would we not go ask the state to reimburse us for a third of a building that we already bought?,” said Councilperson Dee Anne Shaw.

The first submission of the Capital Heritage Grant is due by April 14, followed by another deadline on June 9. Due to the biennium nature of the grant cycle, awardees won’t be notified until July 2023, but the museum board has plans to move forward in the meantime.

The museum board is officially ready to accept approved volunteers for work with the collection. Volunteering will begin on Thursdays, but according to Shaw, the opportunities for engagement may expand after the first month.

“Expressly, we will have some members of the Friends of the Aberdeen Museum, the Grays Harbor Genealogical Society, and a few local historians that have signed up to start organizing and re-documenting the collection. We also hope to move the collection soon, so that would add another level of engagement,” he said.

Interested volunteers are encouraged to fill out a form with the city of Aberdeen to be approved to work with the collection.