A groundbreaking ceremony held for a 40-unit duplex development called the Montenot Meadows project was held on a snowy and cold Jan. 16, at the end of Montenot Blvd., off Alma Drive in Perryville.
The process that led to the groundbreaking ceremony was three years in the making.
On Jan. 7, 2022, with the guidance of the Delta Region Community Health Services Development Program under a branch received by the Perry County Health System, 18 individuals met virtually during a Community Connect event to highlight collaboration already taking place in the community and hear the concerns of community members and joint partners.
In April and May 2022, the community joint partners participated in action planning workshops where housing was identified as one of the top priorities that needed to be addressed to improve the health of the community. A housing team was established, and the team recruited new members every step of the way, with the guidance of real estate developer Chad Hartle, an application for a 40-unit facility was sent to the Missouri Housing Development Commission (MHDC) in September 2022.
Because the application was not complete, the team went back to the drawing board. Another application was submitted in the fall of 2023, and in December 2023, the team was notified that the application had been approved by MHDC.
Addressing the crowd, Hartle said, “This is a special day for us. Through this extremely competitive process, only 20 percent of these applications are approved every year by the MHDC, and we're competing against St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, Columbia and every other community in the state. There'll be over a hundred applications submitted every year, and they'll approve 20 to 25. So, I feel blessed that we were selected, and a lot of it is because of this group that was formed that I'm blessed to be a part of.
“Thank you very much for inviting me into the group. Perryville is very special for us. It was 36 years ago that Geneva, and I had our first groundbreaking not far from here. Over at Harvest Circle — the Perryville Senior Garden Apartments — and this is the same shovel we used back then. Special thanks to First State Community Bank for being our partner on this and doing a big role as an investor and construction lender and everything else on this deal.”
The ceremony concluded with the groundbreaking, which, in this case, involved breaking more snow than ground.
