This week St. Albert city council put an end to the Capital Partnership Program, a program that only succeeded in wasting people’s time.
The program officially began on Jan. 1, 2015, though it was originally approved in 2013. The vision was to provide money to community groups to build new facilities in St. Albert. The city would provide a third of the money, up to $5 million, and community groups and other levels of government would provide the rest.
The city even held meetings for potential applicants – not-for-profits, volunteer groups or other community organizations – to help gear them up for the potential funding options available in the program.
Just a few months after the program began, city staff recommended council stop taking submissions. No groups ended up getting approved, though a few groups did apply. The program finally ended this week when council unanimously voted to end the process for the St. Albert Community Performing Arts Centre. Michael McElroy, president of St. Albert Performing Arts Society didn’t have good things to say about the program.
“I think there’s something terribly, terribly wrong to put an organization like us through the rigours of all this when there was never any chance for it to happen,” he said.
McElroy is right. Council took up valuable time from community groups – many of them volunteers – and didn’t provide them with anything for their time spent applying for the program, which included attending workshops and building high-level proposals.
Dynamyx Gymnastics Club president Cathy Schwer was also frustrated with the project, as Dynamyx’s proposed gymnastic facility never made it past the first stage of the program.
“For us, we put in a lot of time and energy, then got denied,” she said.
Although city council did have a plan for up to $40 million to be spent on the program, no actual funding commitment was ever set aside. Mayor Nolan Crouse said the program failed because of the lack of dedicated funding, which is why he opposed it from the beginning.
Coun. Cam MacKay said he thinks the city owes all the groups involved an apology.
“I’m a little bit embarrassed about how this all evolved. A whole bunch of groups spent time and money to submit applications for money that was never there,” he said.
In the end, the Capital Partnership Program ended up being no more than a pie-in-the-sky proposal that wasted both council and community groups’ time. The idea behind the program, to help community groups build new facilities, is worthwhile. But the process behind the program was flawed from the start without clear dedicated funding. The program was only ever built on hope and it ended as a failure.
Time is a valuable commodity for community groups and it shouldn’t be wasted. Hopefully the failure of this program will serve as a lesson to both council and administration. Good intentions are only good when they produce results.
