During the holiday break mayor Ray Alstrom worked on a few things in the office. He worked on completing the community Development Block grant and the Rural Development Assistance grant. These grant applications are for a new community center and are from the state of Alaska, Department of community and Regional Affairs.

The residents of Marshall have expressed the need for a new and larger community center to accomodate visitors during holiday activities, since the present building is too small. This involved stating the reason why we need a new center, the process in which the city of Marshall will go about completing this project and how the public has participated in the decision, including records of minutes of two public meetings in which the public discussed the need for a new and larger center, how many jobs the project would provide during construction and how many permanent jobs would be created after the project was completed. The grant also included the budget which involved the breakdown of how many residents would be employed and what types of positions would be involved, materials ordered, the hourly breakdown of employees and how long employmet would last during the life of the project.

Other things that had to be included were a description of the equipment the city would use, and what kind of positive impact this new and larger community center would have on the residents that come to Marshall for activities.

The grant process is very competitive statewide and a lot of time was spent on preparing the grant applications to convince the grant committees that this project is very important to the community.

Another project that Ray was involved with during the holidays was calling various organizations about giving donations to the Meyers family because they had lost everything in a house fire on 12/31/95. Their basic needs have been met from all the donations that were received. Right now we will be looking for funds to construct a new house for them.