VIDALIA — With more than 30 projects under way in the city, Vidalia leaders have been working to improve the city.

With that many projects in motion at once, the city received some good news last week when two grants from the State Department of Treasury were received.

The first grant was $9,000 for a new utility department vehicle.

City Manager Ken Walker said the vehicle is a pick-up truck that will be used by the utility department director for his day-to-day work.

“The department has needed one for a long time,” he said. “He is just going to use it to manage the department.”

Walker said the state contract price of the vehicle is approximately $16,000 and that the city is paying the remaining $7,000 of the cost.

The second grant the city received was for online archiving of city ordinances and minutes.

The grant was in the amount of $6,000 and will go toward paying for all of the computer hardware and software needed for the online archiving, Walker said.

Walker said the equipment costs approximately $7,050, and that the city is paying the costs not covered by the grant.

The new system will allow for a much quicker and easier search through Vidalia’s ordinances, Walker said.

“You used to have to manually look through everything, and that could take a lot of time,” he said. “You get the same benefits you get for anything when it is computerized instead of on paper.”

Walker said the city is archiving their ordinances online first because they were the most important.

“We need to be able to pull them up quickly, and this allows us to do that,” he said.

Walker said the city’s plan is to continue to archive its records once the ordinances are put online.

“We want to use this for our other areas of government,” he said.

Walker said the eight months of working and waiting on the grant will be well worth the city’s time.

“This is just going to make retrieval that much easier,” he said. “It is going to save us a lot of time and energy.”