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Wednesday January 29, 2025 | LANGFORD, BC
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Times are tough, economics are tight. That message resonated through about three hours of deliberations by the Langford Community Advisory Committee last night as they divided up $85,000 that was earmarked by council for Grants in Aid.
That’s $15,000 less than last year, even though more than twice as many groups applied for varying amounts of funding support. The higher number of applicants was due to a vigorous call-out for applications, said committee chair Keith Yacucha.
The committee is comprised of three city councillors (Keith Yachuca, Colby Harder and Mark Morley) and five community members: C. Foxall, F. Johnson, N. Lehman, R. Plomp, and J. Whiteway.
Two other city councillors attended in the audience: Kimberley Guiry and Mary Wagner.
New application guidelines:
Groups were allowed a maximum request of $10,000 but that seemed much out of alignment with the number of applications received this year (or even last year, when fewer applications were received).
The call-out also included school parent advisory committees (PACs) for the first time, yet school-related projects were then questioned. There was some concern expressed by at least three committee members that some of the school-related funding requests were a form of downloading school costs onto the municipality instead of SD62 dealing with the costs within their own budgets.
More applications, smaller budget:
The applications that were submitted tallied to about $246,000 with a budget of only $85,000. Councillor Colby Harder did try to increase the grant fund to $100,000 (to match last year’s grant expenditure) but that motion failed.
Last year $100,000 achieved by dipping into council contingency. An increase to $100,00 this year would have meant a small tax increase (about 0.25% according to the Director of Finance).
So it was a bit of a bloodbath to pare down from $246,000 to $85,000, often with arbitrary mechanisms of highs/lows and unspoken consensus.
Processed by group:
Committee Chair Councillor Keith Yacucha chose a new deliberation format this year, batching what were considered to be groups or organizations with similar missions.
The 37 applicants were loosely grouped as:
- School PAcs and Groups
- Community Events
- Arts & Culture
- Sports and Recreation
- Community Associations / Services
- Food Security
- Environment
Criteria & process:
Prioritization included whether the service or activity was serving Langford directly. However, that topic never came up when deliberating over an application from a Sooke-based group.
It was a difficult job for the committee to go through every application in detail. The full agenda was over 800 pages long. On that point alone, many people in the room appreciate the efforts of the committee.
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Some would-be grant recipients (like the Juan de Fuca Performing Arts Society and the Langford Legion) met with the good fortune to be shifted to consideration for having line-items in the regular city budget; that will of course be up to council as it deliberates the budget.
There seemed little point to have grant applicants (a crowd of about 40 people) sit through three hours of deliberations if they weren’t allowed to get up to make a presentation or even clarify points being considered by the committee.
The final decision for the grant amounts will be placed on a future council agenda for final approval.
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NEWS SECTIONS: LANGFORD