The city of Evansville will lose out on $1 million in state matching funds for road improvements after an administrative error left a signature off its grant application, officials confirmed.
The Indiana Department of Transportation announced the recipients of the 2026 Community Crossings Matching Grants on Tuesday, Dec. 9, awarding millions of dollars to cities and counties across the Tri-State region. But Evansville, despite having received the grant in previous years, was not among them.
City Engineer Michael Labitzke said Evansville likely missed the cut in the increasingly competitive application process due to a costly oversight – a single missing signature.
“When we spoke with INDOT, they indicated that a signature was missing from one page of our application,” Labitzke said. “Upon review, we realized that, while we had the signed form, we had incorrectly attached an unsigned version. Unfortunately, it was too late to correct the mistake.”
That form was supposed to bear Evansville Mayor Stephanie Terry’s signature. She signed the document, but a blank copy of the form was delivered to the state rather than the autographed version, according to Labitzke.
The rejection marks a setback for local infrastructure plans at a time when road work projects span the length and breadth of the city. Evansville had applied for the program’s maximum award of $1 million with the expectation of using the funds to repair roads, as it had done in year’s past, including Washington Avenue and Sycamore Street.
“Now that we know it’s going to be a million less than we had planned for the year, we got to prioritize within the year now and figure out which was the worst that we probably need to address first,” Labitzke told WFIE-NBC 14 News.
City spokesman Joe Atkinson stressed that Evansville was not guaranteed to receive the maximum grant request had the proper form been submitted due to recent legislative changes to the Community Crossing program that has made it more competitive.
But even with those changes, Gibson, Vanderburgh, Posey and Dubois counties all received the maximum award of $1 million. Last year, the City of Evansville received $729,809.30.
The Republican-backed reforms to the program, which provides matching grants for local road and bridge improvements, capped funding awards to $100 million annually statewide — down from previous years when funding was more readily available. INDOT also reduced the maximum award per municipality from $1.5 million to $1 million per fiscal year.
With the new funding cap, INDOT officials have emphasized the importance of precise cost estimates without contingencies or inflation adjustments. The department has also consolidated its application process to one cycle per fiscal year, making each opportunity more critical for municipalities.
Atkinson said the city has approximately $2 million budgeted for paving projects in 2026, adding that officials will once again vie for Community Crossings grant dollars when applications open in June.
“The city will continue to do road work this spring,” Atkinson said. “During the winter months, the city engineer’s office will finalize a comprehensive paving package and bid it out.”
Houston Harwood can be contacted at houston.harwood@courierpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Missing signature likely cost Evansville $1M in grant funds
Reporting by Houston Harwood, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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