qathet Regional District has directed staff to allocate the COVID-19 safe restart grant funding from the reserve fund to support operations and capital projects as listed in a staff report on the fund’s revenue and identified expenditures.
At the January 28 regional board meeting, directors also voted that staff prioritize allocation of the funding to rural area services to the degree possible.
The regional district received $424,000 from the provincial government under the COVID-19 safe restart grant and regional district staff have come up with a list of projects for expenditures under the allocation.
At the January 20 finance committee meeting, Electoral Area E director Andrew Fall said the COVID-19 safe restart granting recognizes local governments are facing higher costs and lower revenues, so he thinks it is a great program.
Electoral Area B director Mark Gisborne said looking through the fund’s revenue and expenditures, it was well broken down to the dollar, so he wanted to thank manager of financial services Linda Greenan for the hard work she’s done.
He said, however, he had been going through which funding was going to which service, and he came up with about $180,000 going to electoral area services.
“I can only assume the rest, $270,000 or so, is going into shared services,” said Gisborne. “What I have said before is municipal residents get a very nice amount of grant funding from the provincial government. I would like to point out that rural residents don’t get a discount on their provincial income tax because of where they live. However, they do get unfairly penalized when the income tax is redistributed to local governments and a significant advantage is given to the urban municipal residents.”
Gisborne said if a motion was made to put a little bit more weighting toward electoral area residents to try and balance out the disparity between municipalities and regional districts, he would support such a resolution.
Chief administrative officer Al Radke said he wanted to point out that whatever the regional district does with the COVID-19 restart grant, it cannot be used to reduce the 2021 taxes or to keep taxes artificially low.
“We can go back to the drawing board and try to find out ways and means to reutilize these funds, but right now, we’re oversubscribed and I don’t know if staff have thoroughly scratched their heads as to what else is out there to apply the funds to, but it was a group concerted effort to come up with the monies we have so far,” said Radke.
Finance committee chair and city director George Doubt said what he was taking from this is that staff is going to have to reduce the overall figure, not looking at additional projects to cover, and to try to cover as best they can the projects on the list. Radke said that is correct.
Electoral Area D director Sandy McCormick said she supported the recommendation and supports giving priority to the rural areas.
The committee passed a motion that it recommend the board direct staff to allocate the COVID-19 safe restart grant funding from the reserve fund to support operations and capital projects in 2020 and 2021 as outlined in a staff report presented at the finance committee meeting. The motion carried.
Fall then moved that the committee recommend the board direct staff to prioritize allocation of the grant funding to rural area services to the degree possible.
Fall said there was no intention to ask staff to go back to the drawing board. He said the list of revenues and expenditures was comprehensive, coming from all departments.
“I trust staff tried to find suitable sources or places for money to be spent,” said Fall. “My intention is not to be any slight on the city. I have no problem with some of this going to services that benefit the city, even if the city has other funding.”
Doubt said his understanding of the grant allocation is that it is based on a dollar amount per capita of all residents in the regional district. Greenan said that sounds correct.
“However unfair we may feel that the sharing of it is between municipal and different types of local governments within the province, this funding is allocated to the regional district on the basis of all of the residents within the regional district,” said Doubt, adding that it includes city residents. “Some of these are directed to regional projects. None of them are directed to funding City of Powell River initiatives, but some are regional projects, which are shared about 50-50 between residents of the city and residents of the electoral area.
“I don’t mind focusing where we can on rural projects but I think we need to respect there are residents of the regional district who live in the city and they get a benefit from regional projects, just as other residents of the regional district do.”
Fall’s motion carried unanimously.
