Keep San Marcos Beautiful shares $400,000 grant award

The City of San Marcos’ Keep San Marcos Beautiful program has been named as an affiliate recipient of a portion of a recent $400,000 grant award to Keep Texas Beautiful. 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Gulf of Mexico Division recently announced that Keep Texas Beautiful would be among 17 recipients awarded over $7.8 million for innovative projects focused on reducing the amount of trash in waterways. 

“Keep San Marcos Beautiful is excited to work with Keep Texas Beautiful on litter in not just our local waterways, but waterways across Texas. Many activities lead to litter in our rivers, and working on this project will help identify best practices of inland waterways,” said Amy Thomaides, Community Enhancement Initiatives manager.

KTB will receive more than $400,000 over a two-year period, working directly with affiliates in the Houston/Galveston area, San Marcos, and the Rio Grande Valley. KTB will be working in at least three communities: Keep South Padre Island Beautiful, Keep Houston Beautiful and Keep San Marcos Beautiful, with grant funds being allocated among the communities.

KTB is thrilled to begin working on this project that will identify gaps in each community’s litter prevention programming and promote education and resources to businesses and individuals with an end goal of reducing litter and its eventual flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Keep Texas Beautiful is grateful to receive this EPA grant and looks forward to working with the project communities to help address the ever-increasing and important issue of litter in our waterways,” said Sara Nichols, KTB program director. “Through this grant, we are hoping to create programs that are proven to work and can be implemented in any community with litter and illegal dumping issues.” 

As a named recipient of the trash-reduction projects scheduled for this award, Keep San Marcos Beautiful expects to partner with other city departments and local entities to launch a comprehensive anti-littering campaign, emphasizing the need to protect the river. The project details are still in the preliminary stages and stakeholder meetings are tentatively scheduled to begin in November.

For more information, contact athomaides@sanmarcostx.gov.