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LEESBURG — At the Leesburg Town Council meeting Monday, Council President Christina Archer attempted to clear up questions regarding the reason Leesburg is not participating in the Community Amenities Program (CAP).
“I’ve had some people ask me about why is Leesburg not receiving a CAP grant when we see pictures in the newspaper with all these other communities getting it,” Archer said. ”So I thought I would come back and sort of summarize what has taken place on this and why not. I think we’ve kind of covered it in our various meetings over the last year, but a summary may be in order here.”
Archer said beginning in spring 2025, she was asked to attend a meeting for communities in the county. The meeting was hosted by Kosciusko Economic Development Corporation to discuss the CAP.
“I want to keep it clear that the program we used for the grant for our sidewalks along Van Buren Street was from K21 — it was not a CAP grant. At the time, that money that they were making available was from the sale of the hospital — KCH — to Lutheran system, and Leesburg was entitled to a $200,000 grant. We just had to find a project that was somehow related to health,” Archer said. “At the time, the number one request was probably a playground, but we had no available land to put a playground on. So we went with the second choice, which was sidewalk/walking path. K21 agreed that would be a good project, so that’s what we did. Now the CAP program is a different kind of program. You apply for it with K21 accepting the applications, but it is not technically their program, per se.”
Archer said the CAP grant was intended to be used by smaller towns in Kosciusko County and is a matching type program where 50% of the project would be covered by the town and the other 50% by the CAP grant.
Archer said the process began with an initial questionnaire.
“According to their program, whatever you applied for had to be considered a community amenity,” she said.
Archer read directly from a document she received from CAP, which gave examples of community amenities.
Some of the examples are parks, playgrounds, community centers, swimming pools, sports facilities and walking and biking trails.
“I’m going to stop right there because a trail is different from a sidewalk,” Archer said. “The one that was going to concern us was sidewalks. Sidewalks are not considered a community amenity because they apply mostly to the private residences that they go by. The one thing we found was for something to be called a walking path or trail, it had to have some type of destination. It was supposed to be something to promote social interaction and maybe improve educational opportunities, but the main thing was having a destination.”
Archer said the first destination the town explored was continuing down Prairie Street and continuing a path to Leesburg Elementary School.
“At the time, it was thought that perhaps the kids in town could walk to school,” Archer said.
Archer and Leesburg Street Commissioner Craig Charlton attended meetings with Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert, Kosciusko County Community Coordinator Amy Roe, Kosciusko County Highway Department Superintendent Steve Moriarty and others.
“The number one thing that came out of that meeting was that in the state of Indiana, children may not cross a railroad track in order to get to school. It is against the law. Even though occasionally you’ll see a school getting around that, what we were told by Dr. Hoffert and others is that it can take years going through the legal proceedings to get permission to be able to walk across a railroad track,” Archer said.
“The reason that particular destination was abandoned was because we explored every possible way to do it and it was not going to be a possibility. Our next option was to consider some sort of walking path to the baseball fields on the other side of Maple Leaf. Frankly, to come up with a reasonable way to get there was going to not serve the purpose of getting the sidewalks we want on Prairie Street. I mean, yeah, you could end up with a nice sidewalk to the baseball park but that’s not what we were wanting. People here wanted sidewalks on Prairie Street. So we did look at it, and again we met with various people who would be involved with that, and it came to a similar unworkable situation. I went back and discussed with Amy Roe whether she thought the grantee would be willing to give us a little slack and let us do the sidewalk project just for Prairie Street, which is what we wanted, and the answer was ‘no.’”
Archer said she has been to numerous meetings with various people.
“The deadline for this round was June 1, so a few days before June 1, Amy called me again and said, ‘Are you sure you want to turn down this round?’ and unfortunately I had to say yes because we cannot find a way to comply with the specifications for this particular grant,” Archer said.
Archer said she will continue to look into other grant programs that may be available to help with this project.
“We certainly are not giving up on being able to do it, but it’s just not going to work with this particular program,” Archer said.
Charlton brought up the Plain Township Transportation and Improvement Fund, which may have money available for the town to use toward improvement and maintenance of roads and infrastructures.
Councilman Tom Moore pointed out the price of concrete has increased significantly, driving up the cost of sidewalk projects. In addition, the town would have to come up with a portion of the cost of the project.
“Our local road and street budget — our income from that — there’s no way we could — well, we could, over the course of eight years, maybe 10, pigeonhole that money, and that would prevent us from doing any work on our streets. So we have a somewhat or at least a fixed amount of money to work with,” Moore said. “That’s the negative part The best part about this is we still have our sidewalk replacement program in town.”
In this program, the town pays for concrete that is 4 inches deep, 5 feet wide and 66 feet long, which meets ADA accessibility requirements. The remainder of the expense is the responsibility of the property owner.
• Leesburg Town Council meetings can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/@LeesburgIndiana46538
• Information about town ordinances can be found online at https://www.leesburgindiana.com/
The next regular meeting will be 6:30 p.m. July 13.
