Here’s a Grant – Merry Christmas

In his first year in office review, Mayor Fedeli listed among council’s many accomplishments the securing of a $50,000 grant to study the feasibility of wind power electricity generation for North Bay. This grant, along with matching dollars from other interested parties, was secured in part by the new GAP officer, hired by the mayor to consolidate grant applications within the city. The GAP officer is there to assist and encourage anyone seeking financial aid from the city to look elsewhere for free money.

Notwithstanding that North Bay Hydro had a study which said wind power was not feasible around North Bay (with the possible exception of the Manitou Islands), council decided to support another study - as long as they did not have to pay for it. Advances in technology, the changing weather patterns, increased demand for power and the fact that Sudbury was going to have a wind farm (cancelled), were seen as good reasons to re-study the potential for wind generators along a rocky outcrop within city limits.

At first blush the using of other people’s money in the form of Federal or Provincial grants may look attractive. Look what the eight million plus dollar DREE grant did for us in the Ferris swampland that we are now trying to sell for a buck an acre. Without that grant much of the development in that area would have been located elsewhere in the city. The only saving grace is that most of those tax dollars came from people other than North Bayites.

The Federal government usually just throws all tax dollars into a big pot and then dishes it out as it needs it – in this case - $50,000 to record wind at a site in North Bay. But how many of our tax dollars were needed to write that cheque? Call it bureaucracy or whatever term you like, the taxes needed to get an end result of $50,000 grant were much, much larger.

Collecting the taxes, whether they be income taxes, GST or gasoline taxes costs a lot of money. There are the collection officers who make sure you turn over about 50% of your earnings to government; there are computers, software and technicians to pay; staff to sort through and decide on who gets the grants; people who write up and follow up on grant policies and procedures; elected officials who lobby for grants, sit on committees to determine how grants can best serve the country’s needs; auditors to check that grants are properly recorded and used, not abused; and finally the local staff who apply and then receive the grants and must account and audit.

That is not to say that all of the above people and functions are not necessary, because as we have seen with the Gun Registry and the Sponsorship Program, when things go wrong it costs even more. At our own city level one can readily see from our budget how much it costs in administration to get one dollar from the taxpayer to the worker who is filling potholes on Oak Street.

How much did that $50,000 cost the tax payers of Canada? Would $75,000 be low? The real question is, did we taxpayers need to spend that money? How often have we seen grants that were to create jobs or improve our lifestyle wasted or abused? How many were for ideas that simply would not fly if the money had to come from investors who expected a return or met a social objective? Was it this Grants and ‘Forgivable Loans’ mentality that got the Conservation Authority into trouble?

Even if some elite group like the FCM has decided that we should be studying wind power and they are willing to support applications for grants, we ought not to lose sight that we are spending our own money, plus overheads. When we have a large lake that has thousands of cubic meters of water falling down into Georgian Bay that could generate power for about 3 cents compared to unreliable wind power at +8 cents, are were putting our dollars in the right place?

The mayor could have skipped that $50,000 grant from Santa (because we all know who Santa is) in his list of first year accomplishments. I’m not happy that some of my tax dollars went to that study. From my perspective, even supporting a small ski hill on a slope exposed the southern sun makes more sense for my tax dollars.