St. Albert city council could soon put more granting authority in the hands of administration and its advisory committees, a recent workshop suggests.
Councillors participated in a Feb. 7 workshop exploring different approaches to the city’s granting policy, including how grant programs are created, general granting principles to guide how money is given out, and accountability mechanisms for how grants are reported on after awarded. The feedback administration took will help guide updates to council’s granting policy to come before council later this year.
This past year, St. Albert allocated $1.7 million in civic grants, a pot of money that includes $450,000 from the provincial government for Family and Community Services Support funding.
During the council’s budget deliberation late last year, councillors raised concerns that some grants — such as the outside agencies operating grant — are mismatched to growing need.
Anna Royer, St. Albert’s division business manager, discussed the reasons for the grant review — which kicked off before the current council’s term — in a January interview with The Gazette.
“More than anything, it’s really administration doing their due diligence to ensure we are as efficient as possible and making sure we’re responding to what council’s priorities are,” Royer said at the time.
Grant funding envelope
Currently, council reviews and sets the budget for each individual granting program. During the workshop, councillors weighed in on the potential to set a general budget for the entire grant funding program instead.
While outlining the general budget option at the workshop, Royer said the alternative option would “allow for a holistic review of city grant investment,” in addition to bolstering flexibility.
“This would allow … some ebb and flow depending on the year,” Royer said.
Coun. Natalie Joly spoke in favour of a general budget for granting.
“I think the flexibility that could provide is where we’ve really struggled the last few years,” Joly said. “We get kind of caught when we have $200,000 left in our community events grant, but we having nothing left in [another grant].”
Coun. Wes Brodhead said he sees the benefit of both options, but noted he is concerned with the potential for a “battle of values” between grant programs competing for the same funding envelope.
Joly argued similar issues already arise with the current model.
“We’ve quite clearly said our values don’t support the arts for the last couple of years,” Joly said.
Additional flexibility could also help empower committees when they advise council about groups that need additional funding, Joly argued, potentially preventing council from approving one-offs at later stages.
“If that flexibility exists and those community groups still don't want to give that funding to that group, that makes our job easier than them coming to us directly,” Joly said.
Mayor Cathy Heron also voiced support for the updated option.
“Anything we can do to get the politics out of granting is of benefit,” Heron said.
Though she said she recognizes it’s “controversial,” Heron argued going further and giving council committees the authority to grant without coming to council would help avoid a situation where “it becomes pick your favourite charity.”
“Too often I’ve seen in the past that we all have our favourites, and that’s not an analytical way to be giving out public dollars when we have such a good group at the Community Services Advisory Committee level and the Environmental Advisory Committee level,” Heron said. “Anything we can do to make it much for fair and make the best use of our public dollars, I’m in support of.”
Grant approvals
While council currently approves all grants, one potential alternative could be for council to approve grant requests over a minimal value, and delegate low-level grants to administration or committees for approval.
Joly said the second option could make things “quicker and easier,” and less stressful for groups waiting for approval, as it passes up the levels of council’s committees to council itself.
Coun. Sheena Hughes was more wary of the potential change.
“It’s a dangerous slope when we start delegating these decisions,” Hughes said. “It will still get political, but that will just simply be political at the administrative level, and we won’t have it be public.”
Hughes said it’s difficult to determine the potential impact of a high-level change such as how grants are approved without looking at the details of specific programs.
“It may not be a one size fits all,” Hughes said.
Now that city administration has gathered council feedback, a draft policy will come before council’s Community Living Standing Committee for direction later this spring.
