Puslinch shared the rural funding complaints voiced by the municipality of East Ferris.
On Jan. 8, Mayor Dennis Lever noted that East Ferris Mayor Bill Vrebosch is very active in ROMA.
Lever said Vrebosch’s concerns are shared by many small municipalities.
Vrebosch expressed great disappointment in the The Small Rural and Northern Municipal Infrastructure Fund and the manner in which $100 million funds were allocated last October.
He said “municipalities individually and collectively provided honest and quantitative input to your government over the past year regarding the best method to distribute these monies.”
“We have all put a great deal of effort into this process but obviously the consultations were a complete waste of everyone’s time and energy.”
Vrebosch said municipalities now appear to be “back to the hat in hand/lottery system for the distribution of funds.”
“This is a total disregard for the input of the municipalities of this province.”
In addition, Vrebosch stated municipalities were given less than one month to choose a project and develop an expression of interest.
He said many municipalities are currently working on their municipal asset management plans and preparing for their 2014 budget deliberations.
“Many asset management plans will not be completed before the end of this year yet we were all being asked to submit an Expression of Interest by Nov. 1, which promotes poor priority planning and provides little time for proper decision making.”
Vrebosch stated the process seemed geared towards large urban municipalities even though “We have been told that this program was truly going to be for small, rural and northern communities.”
However the definition of ‘small and rural’ has been confirmed to include municipalities with a population of up to 100,000.”
“We wonder how a city of 100,000 can be considered to be a small and rural community?”
Vrebosch added “We are trying our best to be creative and innovative in our approach to our planning in an attempt to become financially healthier and move towards greater sustainability in the future. Now we can say that we, together with AMO and most of the other municipalities, are not even being listened to.”
He added that like many other municipalities, East Ferris is also being faced with continuing decreases in our funding through the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund (OMPF); and, significant increases in our policing (OPP) costs.
Puslinch councillor Wayne Stokley added “obviously we share these concerns.”
He then asked if there was a move afoot to garner “more of a response from smaller rural townships to reinforce what East Ferris has put forward.”
Stokley said the same issue came up at a recent Puslinch council meeting where the township had to deal with this funding issue.
“We are unsure of the definitions (regarding applications for funds), we’re not clear on the timing … a lot of that was working against us.”
Stokley asked whether this is an issue the Township should be supporting and to help East Ferris get the ball rolling.
“It’s only going to get worse if we make no comment.”
Councillor Susan Field also favoured Puslinch making comment on the matter.
“One thing which is disturbing is considering a small community as being up to 100,000 people. That includes just about every municipality in the province.”
“We can’t even compete against populations of 50,000.”
Mayor Dennis Lever suggested the CAO draft a resolution for council to consider at its next meeting.
CAO Karen Landry suggested that since the East Ferris resolution was sent to all municipalities through AMO, other municipalities may have responded as well.
“We’ll make you aware of that information as well,” Landry said.
