Several times each year, virtually every municipal council is faced with the same recurring request from various groups: will you waive the hall or arena rental fee for our fundraiser?
It’s a difficult position to put a council in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact anyone holding an event in a municipal facility is almost certainly already being subsidized by local taxpayers.
If there are any municipalities, at least in rural Ontario, operating arenas at break-even or better, they should be touring the land giving seminars on how it’s done. Since fees set by municipalities don’t cover the entire cost of operating a facility, waiving the already-inadequate stipends is going to generate additional red ink to make what is, in effect, a further donation to a charity on behalf of taxpayers. Most municipalities have moved away from providing cash donations to groups seeking funding, preferring to let taxpayers make their own decisions on what organizations they wish to support. However, the requests for hall donations persist because they are perceived as not costing anything.
If municipalities didn’t operate recreation facilities, groups looking to hold fundraisers would have to either rent, or secure the donation of, private facilities, not something widely available in this part of the world. By that measure, the only reason most fundraisers are even possible is because municipalities have facilities available. To argue that they should be provided for free somehow seems excessive. The other side of the coin is that, especially in the case of service clubs, fundraisers held at municipal facilities generate dollars far exceeding the hall rental fees, which are spent on projects in the community. In that light, the forgone hall rental fee could be viewed as seed money.
However, that still leaves municipal officials with the unenviable task of deciding which fundraisers to support and to which to apply the fees. There’s no simple formula for that. Even if you tried to limit the fee waiver to fundraisers for causes considered of benefit to the entire community, you would be forced to get into semantics. Service club dollars are all spent in ways that benefit the municipality; but can every project be considered of benefit to all members of the community equally? No matter how worthy the project, there would be those who would argue for other priorities.
Is a minor hockey or figure skating program of benefit only to registrants? Or does the entire community benefit from the provision of a program that contributes to keeping local youth healthy, engaged and occupied in a positive, character-building activity? How much of the revenue side of the local arena budget do such organizations already generate and what amount of red ink would the municipality be awash in without them?
Mapleton council and staff have recently tried to take the approach that the “cleanest” way to handle such requests is to charge the fee universally and keep everyone’s balance sheet realistic. While that seems a reasonable approach, it hasn’t seemed to limit either the requests or the ongoing debate over their merit.
In the end it’s up to councils to decide what approach best reflects the wishes of the majority of their community and such bodies will continue to weigh the issues and pass their judgments. However, we should recognize the answers are not as obvious as we wish they could be.
Patrick Raftis
