DNR awards more than $400 million for water infrastructure

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources is awarding more than $400 million to improve community water infrastructure grants, according to a press release.

In Mid-Missouri, there were several communities that will get funding to improve drinking water, wastewater, storm water and lead service line inventories.

Columbia, Mexico and Fulton are three cities that will get funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.

DNR directors said there were about 1,000 applications requesting more than $2.4 billion in funding.

Columbia will be receiving more than $3 million, Mexico will get more than $6 million and Fulton is set to get $316,000.

“We received approximately 1,000 applications requesting more than $2.4 billion in funding,” Dru Buntin, director of the Department of Natural Resources, said. “We designed the specific scoring criteria to ensure that the limited funds available are awarded to projects in a way that maximizes the impact of those funds across Missouri - in communities both urban and rural, large and small.”

 Applications were scored based on the applicant’s financial need, engineering capability, and necessity of the project. Given the limited amount of funding, this resulted in a highly competitive application environment.