To attempt to address problems with the complicated web of funding programs that transfer tax dollars from one level of government to another can be a mug’s game.
Concentrate on inequities within one program and you may be ignoring the impact of another that re-balances the scales.
Still, it appears the Township of Mapleton has a legitimate beef with the provincial and federal governments’ focus on funding the most needy municipalities ahead of those with their finances in order. Mapleton has been turned down by both levels though several application-based programs for funds to put a water tower in Drayton. Despite the need for more water pressure to fight fires in new subdivisions, the township was recently turned down for federal funding for a tower because it wasn’t considered as urgent a health and safety issue as some other municipalities are facing.
Mapleton staff and council also feel the fact the municipality’s books are in good shape, with little debt on the balance sheet, weighs against them when it comes to prying cash from upper tiers.
“We feel as staff sometimes we’re penalized because of how well run things are financially,” commented CAO Patty Sinnamon after learning the township wouldn’t be receiving support through a federal fund set up specifically to help small communities with infrastructure needs.
While on the surface, funding those who most need the help seems a logical, even compassionate, way to proceed, municipalities are not charities and higher governments should not treat them as such. Municipal staff and politicians should be encouraged to operate as professionally and efficiently as possible, so funding should really be distributed equitably, rather than philanthropically.
Municipalities, regardless of the state of their ledger, have been pretty much unanimous in recent years in calling for more in the way of “unconditional” funding they can allocate on their own to current priorities – and less of the lottery-style funding that requires repeated submission of project-specific applications, often requiring the wasteful assistance of pricey consultants to complete.
Interestingly, the province at least seems to have recognized this. This week the Liberal government announced annual allocations for municipalities through the new Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund (OCIF). This will be reliable, discretionary funding municipalities can bank on when budgeting, allowing them to direct available dollars where they are needed most without waiting for word the project has been “approved” at some other level. Mapleton is eligible to receive nearly $110,000 a year through the program, which is at the low end of the scale among Wellington County municipalities, but at least it is in the mix.
Ironically, the OCIF is being launched on the heels of the announcement of the latest round of cuts to the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund (OMPF) that provides, you guessed it, unconditional grant funding to municipalities. The province has been steadily whittling OMPF allocations down since 2010, eventually reaching the point municipalities squealed loud enough to cause them to create OCIF to basically replace it. And around we go.
Way back before alphabet soup acronyms like OCIF and OMPF and terms like amalgamation and downloading came to dominate the municipal vernacular, upper tiers used to simply provide municipalities with a formula-based amount of cash which they could then direct to the projects of their choice. When they attempted to balance their own books by cutting funding to municipalities, successive provincial and federal governments attempted to soften the blow by creating the morass of joint funding programs and accompanying bureaucracy that we have today.
Now it appears we’re beginning to head back in the other direction, at least until the political winds change again. For the sake of those we entrust to govern locally, and in the interest of judicious use of tax dollars, we can only hope those winds blow steady for at least a little while.
Patrick Raftis
