September 28, 2026
Funding Capability, Built In: How Horner & Shifrin Positions Water Infrastructure Projects to Win Public Dollars
For small and underserved communities, the binding constraint on water infrastructure is rarely engineering. It is capital. A project can be designed, permitted, and ready to bid and still sit unbuilt for years because the funding package never came together. Horner & Shifrin established a dedicated funding practice inside its Water Infrastructure Engineering service for that reason: in-house funding staff whose focus is identifying funding sources, assembling competitive applications, and sustaining compliance after an award lands. That capability is active today across Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas.
A Dedicated Practice
Clients kept asking for help with funding, and the firm kept providing it, with engineers who knew the programs preparing applications alongside their design work. That work succeeded, and demand for it grew. As requests accumulated across Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, H&S saw a better way to serve those clients and invested in it, giving funding its own staff, its own process, and its own place in the project schedule. The difference shows up in timing. A funding cycle does not move for a design deadline, and a notice that opens with a four-week window closes on schedule regardless of what the design calendar looks like that month. Dedicated staffing is what lets a community pursue every cycle it qualifies for.
The Perspective Behind the Work
W. Brian Ziegler, VP, Business Unit Leader – Water Infrastructure Engineering, has spent 30 years acquiring different state and federal funds to complete vital infrastructure projects for municipalities, counties, and water and sewer districts.
Engineers’ cost estimates and scopes are reviewed against each program’s rules to determine which expenses are allowable under a given funding source. “The key is to match the project to the best source of funding, whether its grant or no/low interest loans. This evaluation considers the scope of the project, the cost, the necessary time frame required for the projects implementation, the likelihood of stacking funds, the financial condition of the client and several other factors,” Ziegler stated. Screening at the estimate stage keeps ineligible costs out of an application. An unallowable cost that survives into an award usually surfaces during monitoring or audit, and the community repays it out of its own funds. The goal is to catch unallowable costs at the monitoring stage, before an audit and after the funding cycle closes.
A Documented Process for Complex Solicitations
We work regularly with economic development appropriations, CDBG awards for community revitalization and public infrastructure in Illinois, IEPA revolving loan programs, and federal rural development funding. Every solicitation is read in full. Funding notices are lengthy, and the practice reads them line by line rather than relying on AI summarization, because scoring criteria, cost-eligibility rules, and documentation requirements are precisely the details a summary drops. Miss a requirement on page 80, and the application is often set aside before anyone scores it.
How an application is written matters as much as what it contains. Project managers are coached on the language reviewers score, such as characterizing an infrastructure deficiency as “chronic” rather than “potential,” because reviewers award points for demonstrated urgency, not hypothetical risk. The technical and funding narratives get drafted together.
“The application must immediately catch the reviewers’ attention and then check all the boxes for eligibility.”
— W. Brian Ziegler, VP, Business Unit Leader – Water Infrastructure Engineering
Agency Relationships and Unwritten Requirements
Published deadlines and posted requirements are not the complete record. Our staff stay in contact with agency program officers in each state during and after the funding cycle. “Our staff have developed long-standing relationships with funding agencies and developed a level of trust,” said Ziegler.
Eligibility gets the same scrutiny. On an Illinois project in a since-unincorporated community, we found that a matching-funds strategy worth significant application points was unavailable because the municipality no longer held authority to approve it. That surfaced before submission rather than in a denial letter, which is why applicant authority gets checked at the start.
Compliance and Portfolio Management
We maintain a central register of funding sources, program cycles, and compliance deadlines, including federal prerequisites such as SAM.gov registration renewals. Let a registration lapse, and the entity cannot receive a federal award, whatever the application scored. More than one person reviews it, so nothing rests on a single calendar. Post-award compliance stays inside the same engagement rather than reverting to the client. For a city clerk or public works director already running a utility, that means the renewals, reporting dates, and spending deadlines are calendared and monitored by the people who prepared the application.
Extending the Model to New States
The Illinois and Missouri workflows are the practice’s most mature: both the NOFA (initial announcement) and the more detailed NOFO (the full funding opportunity) are worked through for every grant or funding cycle. It is documented, so the next state does not start from scratch. As H&S extends its reach into Northwest Arkansas and the Little Rock area, building on the Poplar Bluff office’s established work in Northeast Arkansas, the same sequence is being run there: catalog available mechanisms, establish agency relationships, and stand up the state-specific playbook. No two states administer these programs the same way, so each playbook is built from local practice.
What This Means in Practice
Engineering and funding strategy sit under one roof here. The applications we submit are prepared by staff who have read the full solicitation, tested cost allowability against the program’s rules, and confirmed the applicant has the authority to commit its share, and who will still be handling the reporting obligations after the award closes. For an owner sequencing a project, that puts funding strategy in the design conversation early enough to shape it.
Horner & Shifrin provides water infrastructure engineering, funding strategy, and post-award compliance support for communities across Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. To talk through funding on a current or upcoming project, contact our Water Infrastructure Engineering team.