NORWAY — The Board of Selectmen will meet with Norway’s state senator and representative Thursday evening to discuss frozen state funding intended to pay for the partial rehabilitation of the Norway Opera House.

“Rep. Tom Windsor and Sen. David Hastings have told me that they will come,” Town Manager David Holt said Tuesday.

The meeting will be part of the regular selectmen’s meeting at 7 p.m. in the town office on Danforth Street. It is part of a strategy developed by the 11 towns affected by Gov. Paul LePage’s freeze on a $3.5 million Communities for Maine’s Future grant in June.

LePage stunned towns counting on the funds when he announced that he would delay authorizing the $3.5 million Communities for Maine’s Future bond until 2014. The bond approval was passed by the Legislature in 2009 and approved by a majority of voters in November 2010.

The competitive grant awards provided funding for projects that restore and revitalize key buildings in the community, improve pedestrian access and safety, and are catalysts for local jobs. The communities receiving awards were Bath, Belfast, Dover-Foxcroft, Eastport, Livermore Falls, Monmouth, Norway, Rockland, Skowhegan, Unity and Winthrop.

LePage said to at least one legislator that towns affected by his action could “sell bonds to complete the project, and the state could provide the funds at some later time.”

Representatives from the affected towns met in Augusta recently to compare notes and devise a strategy to try to save their projects, several of which were about to go out to bid.

Holt said packets of information have been dispersed to the lawmakers who will try to get assurances from the governor that the money will be there in 2014 and that towns can recoup the money they put up front to keep their projects going.

Norway is attempting to take out a Bond Anticipation Note in hopes that when the bond is released in 2014 the town will be reimbursed.

Norway already has invested about $100,000 in architectural and engineering fees that would have been recovered through the Communities for Maine’s Future grant. That money is in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars spent over the past five years, including a $200,000 donation by Selectman Bill Damon and his wife, Bea, that originally saved the building.

The three-story brick Opera House on Main Street was heavily damaged when a portion of the sagging roof collapsed under the weight of water in 2007. It was declared a public hazard and taken over by the town in 2010.

The news of the grant delay came just two days after the town transferred the deed to the Norway Opera House Corp. and shortly before the $1.1 million renovation project of the first-floor storefronts was to go out to bid.

Officials and residents worked for the past five years to save the 1894 iconic building in the heart of the downtown National Historic District.

Building a strategy to deal with the worsening crisis of the condition of the opera house took years of debate, Holt said.

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