ABOVE: Fairmont HRA Director Gail Diede holds a piece of heavily corroded pipe removed from the Friendship Village plumbing system. Issues like this were submitted in their application for funding that netted them $1.9 million for this and other issues.

FAIRMONT – Of the $53 million approved by Minnesota Housing for public housing repairs, the Fairmont Housing Redevelopment Authority (HRA) received $1.9 million for work needed at Friendship Village.

The funding will cover plumbing, sewer lines and patio replacement across all 115 units, as well as widening of sidewalks. The current plumbing and patios are from when the building was erected in 1979.

Fairmont HRA Director Gail Diede said this is their second time applying for funding that acts similarly to a grant.

“They’re GO bonds,” she said. “It’s called a grant, but it’s actually a loan. The loan is given at 0 percent and then it’s forgiven as long as we own the property for 20 [more] years.”

The plumbing is a major reason why this funding is necessary, which Diede said is due to their location.

“That’s really costly to get them fixed because we are slab on grade,” she said. “All of our plumbing is running underneath the floor in the units, which is all concrete. Anything to fix it, you need to rip up all the concrete in order to fix it.”

To apply for the grant, Diede said they had a company come in and document all the lines. The photos and video were included with their application to show the severity of their issues. Diede said they have been struggling with plumbing backups and are looking to get lines replaced before any catastrophic sewer failures occur.

“Otherwise, it displaces a lot of people if the plumbing were to go in a building,” she said. “You’ve got displaced tenants that you have to put up in hotels or other types of housing until their unit is back to normal.”

Diede said the HRA hasn’t really applied for many grants before. She said it was a lengthy process, but they received assistance from Southwest Minnesota Housing to gather everything together and ensure the application had all of the necessary information.

With the patios, Diede said they have started sinking and have had cracking issues. With this, there are also concerns about the step-down height, which Diede said can be dangerous for some of their elderly residents.

The next step is to have a technical meeting with Minnesota Housing’s architect. Diede said it will be around six to nine months to get all the paperwork together for their projects, and it will be around a year before they get started.

Without this funding, the wait would have been a lot longer.

“On average, the Fairmont HRA, we get about $250,000 a year in capital funding,” Diede said. “You do a five-year plan with your capital funds on what needs to be done, and you can’t put all your cap funds to one project alone. For the sewer line project alone, I would say that probably would have taken a good 10 years to complete the whole property out here.”

The contractor for the plumbing has been selected, and the patio and sidewalk projects will go out for bids to see who provides the best offer.