Grey Highlands council is going to take a close look at how its community financial assistance program is working.
At its meeting on Dec. 21, council unanimously passed a resolution brought forward by Coun. Paul Allen to review the program that hands out grant funding to local community groups and organizations.
A separate Grey Highlands committee considers applications from community groups to the financial assistance program and makes recommendations back to council on which applications should be approved and which ones should be denied.
On the agenda for the meeting, there were 27 recommendations from the committee that either approved or denied a request for funding. The recommended approvals equated to more than $32,000. With Allen’s resolution coming later in the meeting, council chose to defer all of the funding recommendations until a later date.
Allen said he feels the financial assistance program has strayed from its original intent and council should review how it is working.
“It has changed quite a bit from when it was first implemented,” said Allen.
The program has three funding categories for applications: significant community undertaking, project based/one-time funding and event funding. The goals of the assistance program are economic prosperity and innovation, cultural enhancement, environment and diversity and general social enrichment.
Allen noted that one of the requests before council was for more than $5,000 to waive 288 hours of rental fees at the Kimberley Hall and he said he didn’t feel that was the intent of the financial assistance program. A number of the requests on the list before council included applications for fee waivers for use of municipal facilities.
“It’s totally gone the other way,” Allen said of the program. “The community shouldn’t expect (the municipality) to be able to afford to repair and maintain these buildings if they’re going to be used without any kind of income.”
Deputy Mayor Dane Nielsen chairs the financial assistance program committee and said he supports a full review of the program.
Nielsen said prior to the program being implemented, groups looking for municipal funding for projects came directly to council to make their request. He said during the last term of council the program was put in place to manage financial assistance requests.
“I think it is time to do a full review,” said Nielsen, who added that the initial intent of the program was to provide seed money to groups to help events become self-sustaining.
A full report from staff about the program will come to council at a future meeting.
