Warren County has been shut out of a state grant program aimed at providing funding to address blight.

Both the City of Warren and Warren County had applied — the city for funding to rehabilitate the former Brick House on Liberty St. and the county for demolition funds for, among other properties, the former East St. School.

“I don’t know that I could convey the level of disappointment that I have in the inadequate nature of the program,” Commissioner Jeff Eggleston said. “No one really knew how this grant was going to shake out.”

A total of $12 million was awarded, according to a statement from Gov. Tom Wolf’s office. Eggleston said total requests were for $25 million.

“I think that it was woefully underfunded,” Eggleston said, which he said is “not surprising given the budget discussions in Harrisburg. They’re not going to continue the grant next year.”

The county had requested $200,000 and the city the maximum of $300,000.

Eggleston said there were just five or six awards in the northwestern corner of the state, noting that the awards were focused on urban areas. He said he spoke with state officials who asked him to narrow the grant application and he said he would to get whatever he could. However, Warren County was still left out in the cold.

The issue was discussed during Tuesday’s Warren County Redevelopment Authority meeting and Authority member Joe Scully asked if the county received support from our state-level representatives on these applications.

“If I were to do it differently,” Eggleston said, “(I) would have spent more personal time lobbying the legislature for the money. I think that we could have done a better job working with the representatives to push this along.

“It just seemed very weighted toward a certain area,” he added, calling it a good learning experience.

“In the meantime,” he noted, “we are going to have to go back to the drawing board,” indicating he still wants to find a way to address the demolition of the East St. School “to get that taken care of.”