Jed Platt, cultural arts director for Rexburg, presented a video to the city council chronicling the Romance Theater’s history that will premiere at the city’s monthly art stroll April 7.
The city collaborated with students from Soapbox Agency and used funds from a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council to create the video.
“In addition to preserving our buildings and growing our programming, we are also striving to preserve memories,” Platt said.
Platt said the city was recently awarded another grant in order to create a similar video for the Rexburg Tabernacle.
“We’re excited to document these for future generations to know our story,” Platt said.
Writing and receiving grants
Grants help fund city projects by receiving money from the state, private companies or the federal government.
The city council holds a monthly meeting with each city department where they discuss upcoming possibilities for grants and what projects these grants could be used for. The process of writing grants is then turned over to Mary Flanary, the city grant writer, who coordinated with city department heads.
“I am just really impressed by that,” said Council Member Tisha Flora. “Since we’ve instituted that, we’ve been able to receive a lot of private and state grants that have helped our city stretch their funds. I would hope that our community would be appreciative of the work that goes into that and thank Mary Flanary and everybody involved.”
Filling potholes
As the snow begins to melt, the city has transitioned its time from plowing streets to filling potholes. With the increased amount of snow melting, the city also has to worry about the effectiveness of storm drains. Oftentimes, members of the street department will have to divide their time between filling potholes and opening storm drains.
“One of the reasons our guys aren’t out all day long filling potholes is because they’ve been trying to open the storm drains as fast as they can go so we can get that water into the storm drains instead of running into our sewer system,” said Mayor Jerry Merrill.
Keith Davison, Rexburg’s public works director, said there are a lot of potholes and that he and his team are working to fill them.
Merrill encouraged people to be patient and careful as they are driving as they wait for the city to finish filling potholes.