For the past five years the State of New York has awarded ten municipalities 10-million-dollar revitalization grants.  The process for determining the recipients is highly competitive – past cities have included Rochester, Syracuse, Manhattan and Troy.  However, on December 9, 2021, the Governor’s Office presented our very own Little Falls with the grant.
According to Mayor Mark Blask, “As you can imagine, these are much sought after dollars.  As a small city, many people said we were punching above our weight going after the state’s largest grant, but we worked hard on this for two years and were rewarded today.  Our winning application was a by-product of a lot of people rowing in the same direction. What started out as a gargantuan task was made less so due to the hard work of a dedicated team.
Once you start naming names you always run the risk of leaving someone out so please take this as a heart felt thank you to all who helped.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the following people.  Without them this simply doesn’t get done:
Dave Warner and Deborah Kaufman (Class of 1973) were tremendous.  From shooting the video we used in our application to putting on our community input event to a hundred things in between, they absolutely knocked this out of the park and the city is indeed indebted to you.  Thank you both.
The Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties were there with us on day one and all the way through – Alicia Dicks runs that organization and has been a friend to Little Falls for many years.
Joe Wicks works for the Community Foundation and his expertise and experience were relied on throughout the process.  Thank you, Joe, for being awesome.
You probably are not surprised our City Engineer has been elbows deep in this for some time.  Chet Szymanski’s (Class of 1997) work on this has been stellar.  Thank you, Chet for continuing to go above and beyond for Little Falls. It is appreciated.”