A program that's supposed to help local organizations proved to be a big headache.
New Westminster city council has expressed concern about the new requirements for organizations seeking 2014 grants from the city. The city currently offers amateur sports, childcare, environmental, city partnership, arts and cultural, community, and heritage grants.
Coun. Betty McIntosh said some grant applicants were "distressed" with this year's process, as some grants required 15 pages of paperwork to be competed. She noted that many organizations rely on volunteers, who don’t have the capacity to sit and spend a weekend completing a grant application.
"We discouraged people this year from even applying. That is not our intent," she said. "We need to simplify our procedures."
Gary Holowatiuk, the city's director of finance and information technology, said staff understand there are concerns with this year's grant application forms, and will be addressing those concerns in time for the 2015 grant process.
"This has to be simplified," said Mayor Wayne Wright. "We have had many, many calls from people who could not understand it."
Coun. Bill Harper wants the city to take steps to ensure the complex requirements of this year's grant process didn’t deter any previous applicants from applying.
Coun. Jaimie McEvoy said the requirements created an impediment to small organizations that rely on small grants. He said the goal of the grant program is to help organizations, not put up obstacles.
"I have a very serious problem with what happened here," he said.
Dean Gibson, the city's director of parks, culture and recreation, said the expanded applications caused a lot of discussion and debate in the community. "There were mixed reviews," he said.
Despite the concerns, Gibson noted that the city received more applications than in prior years.
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr said there's a difference between a group that seeks a $500 grant annually to "blow up anvils once a year” and a new applicant that's offering something that hasn’t been done before. He said the city needs to have a common sense approach that takes into account that some established organizations have been providing services for years and may not need to provide pages and pages of background information.
Council directed staff to takes steps to ensure no previous grant applicants refrained from applying to the city for 2014 grants because of the complexity of the application forms. The city also directed staff to consider creating a new category of grants that would deal with applications for festival funding.
A staff report to council recommended reallocating money from some grants into other programs. The report noted the budget amount is the same as the previous year, but the allocation between grant programs has been adjusted to better reflect the category in which those grants should be directed.
Holowatiuk said the report's recommendations also reflect the fact that Fraserside Community Services Society and the New Westminster Chamber of Commerce applied for grants in previous years, but are now applying for "fees for services" offered. Staff believe those matters are more appropriately handled through departmental operating budgets.
Harper believes festivals should be a completely separate grant category, as it would help council when deliberating grant allocations. He noted the city still has "some work to do" on the issue of festivals, such as dealing with in-kind versus monetary donations requested by local festival organizers
