Council says “Protect It” when it comes to downtown buildings

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today

Darren Dunn

(Seguin) — The Seguin City Council wants to help downtown property owners when it comes to making their properties more firesafe. The council on Tuesday approved the creation of a new “Protect It” grant program. Much like the city’s “Fix-It Facade” grant program which helps to spruce up storefronts downtown, the new program will provide funds to help install fire supression systems in the downtown area.

Main Street and CVB Director Kyle Kramm says this program will help to protect more of the buildings in the downtown historic district.

“Our hisotric downtown has lost several buildings in the recent years due to fires. So, we are wanting to protect our historic character in downtown, as well as being able to make sure our buildings are being able to be used at their fullest capacity. The fire supression system will be able to help with both those areas,” Kramm.

Sprinkler and other fire supression systems can be very costsly, especially for some of the older buildings in the downtown area. Kramm says the Protect It grants will provide funding to cover a portion of those costs.

“We are proposing grants to property owners. For buildings that are less than 5,000 square feet, they would receive a $20,000 grant, or about 50 percent of the cost — whichever is less. For buildings that are between 5,000 and 15,000 square feet, it would be $30,000 or 50 percent (of cost). And buildings over 15,000 square feet, would be $40,000 or 50 percent. We did get some kind of estimates from some of our property owners in downtown about what some of their costs would be for a fire supression system. So that’s where these numbers came from,” said Kramm.

Additional funding can be provided for businesses that partner together to expand fire supression coverage downtown. There’s also additional funding available for property owners that might need to tap into underground utilities on Austin Street. Kramm says the program will get started now, and will likely be phased out over the next few years.

“The goal is to try to have this program die after five years, because of the fact that TXDOT does plan to reconstruct Austin Street in about five years. So we are really going to try to push our property owners to do this,” said Kramm.

Mayor Don Keil joked that the Austin Street project has been a long time coming, so this program may last a while longer.

“Well, they started that (street) progam about 20 years ago,” joked Keil.

Kramm admitted that they are hopeful that it gets started on schedule this time, and they hope that downtown property owners will also take advantage of this new program.

“So until that happens, we are going to keep trying to push our property owners to take advantage of this (now). So that once we have a new Austin Street, we are not having to rip it back up for additional fire supression systems,” said Kramm.

The council agreed to take $100,000 from the city’s utility fund to use to pay for the initial offering of the program. Kramm says he knows there are already a couple of businesses that have expressed interest in tapping into the new grant program.