Fourteen downtown businesses applied for the town’s storefront improvement grant this year, competing for six awards worth up to $15,000 apiece. The review committee meets September 8 and expects to announce decisions by the end of that week.
The program is a fifty-fifty match: the town pays half of an approved exterior renovation and the owner pays the rest. Eligible work covers signage, awnings, windows, masonry repair and lighting. Interior work, roofs and anything behind the building do not qualify.
Who applied
Applications cluster on the two blocks of Water Street between Third and the theater, which is where the program has always concentrated. Four came from businesses that opened in the last eighteen months, including the bookstore at 118 Water and the bike shop in the old feed store.
Half the value of this grant is the money. The other half is that it forces you to actually get three quotes and pick a color.
Marta Ibarra, who used a 2024 grant to rebuild the front of her bakery
The case against
Not everyone is convinced. Council member Priya Menon has argued for two years that the program subsidizes landlords rather than tenants, since improvements stay with the building and rents tend to follow. She has proposed tying awards to a rent freeze of at least three years.
That amendment failed 5–2 in March. Menon says she will bring it back when the program is reauthorized next spring.
Awards are funded from the downtown district assessment, not the general fund. The town has run the program since 2019 and has made 27 awards totaling $310,000.