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Nebraska Rural Projects Act

The Nebraska Rural Projects Act will provide matching funds to Nebraska nonprofit economic development organizations with projects to build new rail access business parks in counties of less than 100,000 people.

Eligible Applicants

An applicant must be a nonprofit economic development corporation. The Applicant must be registered as such with the Nebraska Secretary of State and must be recognized as a 501(c) entity by the Internal Revenue Service.

Legislative Bill 644 (2025) (codified as Neb. Rev. Stat. § 77-3,114) prohibits foreign adversarial companies from receiving benefits under an incentive program of the State of Nebraska. Prior to applying, please see Memo 25-04 Foreign Adversarial Company, found also in the Guidance Documents section. Applicants meeting the definition of foreign adversarial company will not be approved for benefits. See the final reading of LB644 for more information.

Eligible Projects

To be eligible for matching funds, the project must: (i) develop a new industrial rail access business park and (ii) be located in a Nebraska county with less than 100,000 inhabitants. To be regarded as developing a new industrial rail access business park, the project must undertake at least one of the following objectives: (i) add rail access to an existing business park, (ii) add a new business park to a currently served rail site, or (iii) create a new business park and create new rail access to serve the new business park.

Matching Funds

Subject to adequate appropriation of funds, an applicant may be eligible for two dollars of matching funds for every dollar of investment in the project up to the first $2,500,000.00 of investment. Five dollars of matching funds may be made available for every dollar of investment in excess of $2,500,000.00. Matching funds will be available to the applicant on an annual basis. No more than $30,000,000.00 of matching funds will be paid for any one project.

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