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New West groups sound alarm about changes in funding

New Westminster is taking another look at its partnership grants after community groups and council members sounded alarms about what’s being proposed for 2019.
Arts Council Fridays on Fron
The arts council, which coordinates music at events like Fridays on Front (shown here) and Uptown Unplugged, is one of the local groups expressed about changes to the city's partnership grant program. City council has referred the 2019 grant requests back to staff for more work.

New Westminster is taking another look at its partnership grants after community groups and council members sounded alarms about what’s being proposed for 2019.

The City of New Westminster distributes funds annually to groups through several different grant programs, including partnership grants, where reductions from past years' grants were proposed for some groups and one-year grants were recommended instead of the three-year terms that have been given to some groups in the past.

Colleen Ponzini, the city’s acting chief financial officer, said partnership grant requests for 2019 were “significantly higher” than in previous years, and the committee struggled to come up with some guiding principles on how to handle the requests.

“There is a couple of things that are going on here. There’s a lot more dollars being requested. There are organizations that have multi-year terms but are also asking for additional funding on top of the multi-year amounts that they have been granted in the past,” she told council. “And there were five new ones that were never in the requests in the previous years.”

In addition to recommending that two of the grant requests be considered as part of the city’s operating budget, the committee recommended cuts to other grants.

“We tried to say, we will cut the new ones as well, add them all in and try to come up with some kind of percentage reduction across all of those particular organizations so that we can come up with a total that is a little bit more palatable than the entire request that was asked,” Ponzini said.

For 2019, 23 organizations submitted applications for $1.1 million from the partnership grants program, which had $485,000 to disperse. The staff recommendation considered at Monday’s council meeting was to approve $524,200 in city partnership grants – $39,000 more than the grant committee had been allocated to disperse.

Several groups, including the Arts Council of New Westminster, had requested three-year terms for their grants.

“We at the Arts Council of New West understand that city budgets are tight and the committee for this grant program chose to use a formula that appeared to make the cuts equitable,” said Stephen O’Shea, executive director of the Arts Council of New Westminster. “However, straight-across-the-board cuts to funding doesn’t take into account the value for dollar that the city is receiving from various partners. The arts council’s programs reach thousands of people in the city.”

O’Shea asked council to return the arts council’s grant to current levels and to provide a three-year term.

“I have a lot of problems with this one,” Coun. Mary Trentadue said about the recommendations. “I am really challenged by the fact we have made fairly significant cuts to organizations that rely on this funding and have been doing work in the city for a long time. We are just about to roll out the arts strategy where we are going to rely on a lot of our partners to help us fulfil some of that work, yet we are cutting their grant applications.”

Council approved a motion to refer the report back to staff, so new recommendations for partnership grants can come to council as early in January as possible.

Trentadue said she is “completely opposed” to the one-year terms for some groups, noting three-year terms makes a “very big” difference the ability of some groups to leverage grants from other levels of government.

“This was quite a surprise and a shock to a lot of people in the community,” she said. “Again, I understand why – there’s lots of requests. But I feel like we could have done better as far as communicating this because it was very shocking to a lot of organizations.”

While the partnership grants were referred back to staff, council approved grants for a number of different programs: amateur sports fund ($35,000); arts and culture ($30,000); child care ($39,321); environmental ($20,000); and heritage ($15,922). It also approved more than $57,000 in community grants, but referred a couple of those requests back to staff for review.