The state is rebooting its effort to distribute the $10 million it will receive from Entergy to help Windham County recover from the closing of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.
Under the Windham County Economic Development Program, the state is to award about $2 million each year for five years to foster economic development in the region, which will be affected by the closing of the plant in Vernon this month.
Gov. Peter Shumlin announced Friday that only $814,000 of the first $2 million would be awarded this year for five projects. A total of 24 projects seeking $5.6 million were considered, Shumlin said, but many of the proposals failed to address the administration’s goals for job creation and entrepreneurial capacity.
He said the remaining $1.2 million would be added to the amount to be distributed in next year’s round two.
The administration said it needed to do a better job of explaining what it is looking for in the proposals.
“Everyone did what they were asked to do,” Shumlin said in a statement. “But when I reviewed the applications with my team, I found that most of the proposals didn’t offer the sort of transformational new jobs and economic opportunity we were hoping for, and that they wouldn’t have the desired long-term impact on the region’s economy.”
All five of the approved projects were endorsed by the Vermont Economic Progress Council, which screened the applicants and recommended that 10 of the 24 plans — worth $1.7 million — be approved.
The approved projects were:
• $300,000 to the Bellows Falls Area Development Corp. for site planning and development a new facility for Chroma Technology, a make of optical filters.
• $170,000 to the Brattleboro Development Credit Corp.
• $200,000 to the Sustainable Timber Investment Exchange to build an advanced training timber shop for training, wood science and prototyping.
• $79,000 for the Strolling of the Heifers business plan competition “to foster innovation and entrepreneurship and to create new products, new methods, and new markets resulting in new jobs at new and expanding businesses throughout Windham County.”
• $65,000 for United Way of Windham County’s working bridges program to help stabilize working families.
(The last two are contingent on the receipt of more information, a news release said.)
Among the projects recommended by VEPC but not accepted by the governor was a $400,000 request by Brattleboro Memorial Hospital to implement job creation.
“One of the criteria is leverage,” Moulton said. “There were a lot of good projects that were just not transformative to Windham County economic development.”
Moulton said that rather than award money to projects simply to use up the money, the administration decided to clarify its requirements and roll over the remainder of the $2 million to next year.
“Our messaging was not clear and the applications were missing the mark,” she said. “We decided to reboot the application process.”
Moulton said she expected many of the proposals not accepted could be revised and resubmitted next year.
