Storm Water Runoff

 

Our newest adventure: The Roseville Church of Christ will be applying for a grant to mitigate our storm water runoff. 

 

Why would we do such an unusual thing? This falls in the middle of a busy time for Roseville. We are getting ready to see our preacher off on a dangerous, month long mission trip to Nigeria and Cameroon. Richard leaves December 1 and is scheduled to return home December 31. His wife Theresa and their three boys went with him last year but will remain behind this time around. That will increase the church’s responsibility for their welfare while he is gone – not to mention providing fill-ins for Sunday morning sermons, Wednesday night classes and general leadership for the small congregation.

Thursday, we delivered boxes of food to people we knew of who needed it, courtesy of the City of Maplewood. And Richard is overseeing the installation of new security cameras prompted by three auto break-ins at different times during Wednesday night classes. We are not many in number, why would we opt for grant writing?

The opportunity arose from the Rice & Larpenteur Alliance (RLA). If you haven’t seen the very short video we did of the open house the Roseville Church held in conjunction with RLA you can see it here. At the latest RLA meeting there was a presentation of an opportunity to apply for a Stewardship Grant from the Capitol Region Watershed District. The director of the RLA mentioned that the Roseville Church of Christ would be a good candidate because of our large, extremely old parking lot. We followed up with the Watershed District. They are interested in decreasing the runoff from parking lots and buildings that eventually reaches the Mississippi River. To do so they will replace impervious pavement with porous material and will build rain gardens. Our grant application will include photos of the eight downspouts from our roof that dump onto the parking lot and of the lot itself.

The maximum grant is $40,000. We will not need nearly that much. The matching funds is set at 5%, so even if we got the maximum, we would have to lay out only $2,000. If I am figuring this right, we might get a new, modern looking, porous parking lot, surrounded by pretty rain gardens for very little expenditure. And we will be contributing to a cleaner planet, like God instructed Adam in Genesis 2:15.