Grants 101

At first quick reading of the Nugget headline I thought that the City of North Bay was not making enough grant applications to FedNor and like agencies, however that was not the case. We just are not making as many as other municipalities.

The reason for our paucity of applications may have been because we were told to stop begging and whining for money. Even a poor relative soon learns to stop looking for handouts from the rich relatives down south after having the door slammed in their face a number of times.

The City’s situation may be similar, ironically, to those service clubs who used to look to the City for grants but were turned away at budget time. The Mayor, in his 20/20 booklet, promised to set up a Grant Application Program, complete with an officer to assist anyone applying for a grant. We were going to get more of the ‘free’ money that comes from the taxpayers across the country!

That program has been very successful since one hardly ever sees a service group or charity coming to council for money anymore. But one wonders if the same thing has not happened to our city staff. It seems to me that I recall us being told to shut up about the Psychiatric Hospital or our General hospital would not get funding. Do not apply for any grants for that old building up on the hill!

We shut up as ordered and it looks like the hospital will start building on the sandy playground sometime in 2006 or 2007. But lo and behold, now the Minister says we can keep some of our Psychiatric beds – although where we will put them, no one knows. Maybe we ought to make some new sketches and add them onto the new hospital before we start building… maybe we ought to apply for a grant. And no, it is not a ploy by the Liberals to delay the start of our hospital.

Admittedly the City may have had some timing problems getting their completed forms into the different funding agencies but a close working relationship with out MPP and MP smoothed that out quickly. Our water filtration plant should start pumping filtered water any day now.

All the excellent work on our roadways this summer and the addition of new buses says that we must be getting some of our grant applications right. Contrary to some recent news bites, this had nothing to do with the popular Chair of Works, but only to good budgetary management.

And we did get that $50,000 grant for the wind study. It must be working, because there are company trucks in the city with Wind and Solar logos on the doors. Did you also notice how windy it was this summer? Any day now we will hear about the grant we are getting for looking after the former airbase properties. Mind, we could not just apply for money to snowplough the roads and so on as this might be considered normal city business. No, the grant application said something about environmental clean-up of precipitate caused by the thermal effects of global warming in an under-industrialized location on a sensitive escarpment that had significant deleterious affects on the skid coefficient of wildlife and migratory airbuses on the extended macadam surfaces found in the region.

No doubt we could have received funding similar to Timmins when we put the addition on our police services offices if we had just used our GAP officer and worded our application so it did not read like we were looking for money to make a building addition. The art of obfuscation and distortion are paramount when making a successful application for a grant. No one in government will admit to not understanding what you intend as long as you use a mix of long words and modern jingoism. Use lots of nouns as verbs. And scrawl your signature so you can disclaim it if they ever check up on the grant later.

It is all there on the City Hall webpage under Grants 101.