TIFFIN, Ohio — Since 2014, Tiffin's Facade Enhancement Grant program has offered matching dollars for small businesses to repair their street-facing exteriors. These projects include improvements like new signage, windows, paint and roofs.
Its success in downtown Tiffin inspired Seneca County Commissioner Tyler Shuff to propose a similar program for local business owners across the county.
"I look at this as a way of giving our taxpayers and these small businesses a small portion of their tax money back to invest in themselves, their business, their future," Shuff said.
His proposal uses the county general fund to focus on villages, townships, the city of Fostoria and the areas of Tiffin surrounding downtown.
"Those are local jobs using local contractors, and it just tends to snowball," Shuff said. "You'll see the property owners, when one fixes up their property, the next-door neighbor wants to step up their game. And I really just want to give some love to the rural areas and villages and have something out there for our small business community."
The approved projects would be purposefully spaced out so areas of the county that usually don't see development funding can get renovations done, along with money reserved for rural and outlying areas in Seneca County cities, he said.
"After a six-month period you can open it up to whoever, but it'd be a first come, first serve basis," he said. "But I didn't want one area of the county or one city kind of hogging up all of those funds."
Jill Filliater, owner of Downtown ReEVENTed in Fostoria, said the countywide program is "wonderful."
Filliater is preparing to move her business into a new location in need of exterior renovations.
The proposal will be up for a vote at the Seneca County Commissioners' meeting on Sept. 15.
If approved, Shuff said he would like to get a pilot version of the program up and running for the last three months of the year, before fully implementing it in 2023.