The City of Smithville is exploring a possible grant for housing people in recovery from substance abuse.

At last week’s Smithville Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting, UCDD and UCHRA Executive Director Mark Farley addressed the board stating that because of 2019 statistics, the city has a very good chance of being awarded the Community Development Block Grant from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. If the grant is approved, the Upper Cumberland Human Resource Agency would oversee the project.

“When we looked across the 14-county Upper Cumberland region, we assessed that DeKalb County would probably score highest,” Farley said. “Unfortunately that is based on percentage of overdoses that DeKalb County has compared to other counties across the state.”

“Sometimes grants come to you because of good things and sometimes grants come because things are not going so good,” Farley explained. “For whatever reason, DeKalb County had the highest percentage of overdose deaths in 2019, which is the base year they are looking at. We feel like DeKalb would be the best among the upper Cumberland counties to apply for this grant.”

“The reason I am coming to you first is that for recovery housing opportunities it would probably make sense to put that inside the city limits,” Farley said. “There are not a lot of these grants to be funded. The state only has $1.8 million to go all the way across the state and the maximum grant award can be $750,000 so there will probably only be a couple of awards across the state.”

The housing facility would serve from 8-12 people in recovery, and would be charged rent to the residents that lived there.

“There is no grant match required from the city,” Farley told the board. “We (UCHRA) would take care of all costs. It would not cost the City of Smithville anything. UCDD would oversee the grant writing and UCHRA would manage it. Rent would be charged to the residents. We are talking about a facility for 8-12 individuals and they would pay a monthly rate to cover the operation of it.”

The board voted to authorize the UCDD to apply for the grant, which must be filed by April 29, with no decision as to whether they would move forward with the program.