Stephen Vance, Editor
On Monday Meaford’s council proved once again that handing off the administration of the annual municipal community grants program to a third party just might not be such a bad idea.
In the past, council has had difficulty sticking to the eligibility requirements, and not wanting to say no to otherwise worthy causes they have approved grant requests that didn’t quite meet the requirements. At other times, unnecessarily lengthy debates over a few dollars here and a few dollars there, or whether one request should be approved over another, have resulted in prolonged agony in the council chamber.
This week, while councillors (mostly) stuck to the rules, the task of approving or rejecting 11 grant requests to use up the remaining $17,899 of the grant fund in the second intake for this year dragged on for nearly an hour (the same amount of time council spent on establishing the framework for the millions of dollars involved in the 2017 municipal budget) and it devolved into silliness before it was finally over.
One of the items council wrestled with was a request from the Meaford Hall & Cultural Foundation for $5,000 for a concert for youth being put together by a Meaford resident that is to be held at Meaford Hall.
“This is confusing,” said the mayor, when this item came up for discussion 40 minutes into the exercise. “Why would the sponsoring organization, that sponsors youth, and has a youth outreach program, and that is a fundraising organization, why would they come to the general public?”
Good question.
A few minutes later the mayor expanded on her frustration.
“It’s just very confusing why we are going to be sponsoring a fundraising organization that is out in the community raising money for those kinds of performances, and they’re not contributing anything,” said the mayor.
Yes, that is confusing. It’s also something council wouldn’t have to spend time on at all if they would outsource this task to a third party.
Another few minutes later, the mayor stressed her point further.
“I think we’re approaching this ‘bass-ackwards’, if you’ll pardon the expression. We have a fundraising organization, that could be a sponsoring organization, that is sponsoring a request for community funds. Why are we not getting this request from (the concert organizer) himself?”
Another good question. Also a question that council shouldn’t have to wrestle with. (The answer, by the way, is that the individual putting the concert together isn’t a non-profit or charitable organization, which is one of the eligibility requirements for the community grant fund, so the Hall Foundation applied for the grant instead.)
Confusing indeed.
Ultimately council voted to provide $1,000 of the $5,000 the Hall Foundation had requested.
“This why we need a third party,” one councillor joked at the peak of the madness, causing the mayor to respond, “I agree, this is too painful!”
And indeed it is.
In May of last year I wrote an editorial entitled Community Grants – Rules are Rules, Why Can’t Council Follow Them? In that editorial I expressed frustration with the painful process involved with councillors trying to dole out the annual community grants funding.
“What might seem a simple task is turned into a long, drawn-out, confusing affair caused primarily because this council, and the previous council, just can’t follow the policy developed to make the process much more simple,” I wrote in that editorial, which had been inspired by watching council spend far too much time bending over backwards trying to find ways of accommodating funding requests that didn’t meet the municipality’s own rules for the program. “If council had simply referred to the established criteria, the entire process could have been completed in five minutes,” I wrote at the time.
Later that year, in October, council was presented with a proposal that would have seen the Community Foundation Grey Bruce take over the administration of the grant fund – it’s what they do after all – for the relatively measly fee of about $2,500 (the annual grant fund is $50,000). Council supported that plan initially, but two weeks after narrowly voting in support of the plan, they voted against it after some councillors had a change of heart.
Shortly after council made that decision I wrote an editorial in which I said council’s decision was just plain wrong (Council Foolish to Reject Third Party Administration of Community Grant Fund, Oct. 30, 2015) and here we are a year later, and that still holds true.
While councillors voted 4-3 against taking on the Community Foundation Grey Bruce as a partner in administering the fund, staff told council that the $2,500 fee would have been a bargain.
“The intention of partnering with a third party is that they are experts in doing this, they have a process in which it is done, our (staff) perspective is that it is a brute to try and administer for the amount of benefit we get out of it, and the hand holding ahead of time, during the process, and then ensuring that there’s follow-up afterwards, the $2,500 we would have paid is a mega-bargain. Just in the amount of time that staff spends talking about this process has been far in excess of that $2,500,” said Meaford Treasurer Darcy Chapman at the time.
You can add to the staff time required, the cost of seven councillors (though on Monday two were away), along with a half dozen senior staff members sitting around the council table for an hour while councillors try to make 11 decisions.
By holding on to the administration of the community grant fund for themselves, councillors put themselves in an uncomfortable, if not difficult situation. This is a small town, our councillors are active members of the community and are involved in a wide range of community organizations, and that can create conflicts (not just of interest but of emotion) when it comes time to approving community grant requests.
And we’ve seen all too clearly how well the current system works. So let someone else do it.
