Ahead of this week’s snap provincial election, Mayor Paul Jenkins is urging people to ‘vote like their life depends on it’ echoing a sentiment shared by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO).
At last weeks all candidates meet, Jenkins asked candidates to speak on how they would address the issue of reliable funding.
The mayor noted at the meet that he would have liked the opportunity to ask his question to PC incumbent Ric Bresee who was not present, as well as liberal candidate Lynne Rigby who was also not at the meeting.
“My question focuses on the unsustainable property tax increases that are faced by residents in rural urban municipalities with very small and limited tax bases, skyrocketing policing costs and infrastructure…” he began, before asking if candidates would commit to creating a new and ‘predictable funding model’.
“Will you end the current funding lottery system which is done through these grant applications which are wasteful? And (will you) upload responsibilities that should clearly belong to the province, such as social housing. We’re the only province in Canada where it’s downloaded onto us.”
At a council meeting earlier this month, Jenkins noted that having to vie for “ultra-competitive grants” for social services and infrastructure support is detrimental to smaller municipalities who frequently lose out to more urban centres.
Town Manager Andra Kauffeldt emphasized the toll it takes on town resources to fill out so many applications, only to be denied funding.
She says the town will do over a dozen of these funding applications in a year.
“Some of them are 20 or 30 hours to put together. One we recently did for funding for the Water Tower was 1107 pages long and required 10’s of thousands of dollars of reports and studies to complete it.”
Jenkins noted to MooseFM that the problem of not having reliable funding transcends political parties and he went on to reference the recent AMO “Vote Like your Life depends on it” campaign.
AMO emphasizes that, now more than ever, people should not vote based simply on party lines but should look at who truly recognizes and has a solid plan to address the issue of reliable funding.
After returning from the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference earlier this year, Hastings County Warden Bob Mullin shared Mayor Jenkins’ take.
“We shouldn’t have to beg the province for money… We’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing applications and applying for grants and not getting them. And that’s money that we could and should be putting into infrastructure and moving ahead on some of these projects.”
At the recent candidates meet in Bancroft all three candidates present remarked that the current funding model does not benefit rural municipalities.
Check back in early this week for a full transcript of the candidates answers regarding reliable funding.
