A town is like a business; it has expenses, overhead and income.
Like most businesses, a town will set up an operating budget for the year and attempt to keep within that budget.
Staff wages, operational supplies and insurance costs will add up very quickly for any size town or village.
Where does the funding for these expenses come from, other than the taxes ratepayers pay?
What about any major project a town undertakes that can cost astronomical amounts, yet are absolutely necessary for a municipality to continue providing services to its ratepayers?
To upgrade a sewage pumping station, it is projected to cost a local municipality $1,318,000.00, of which grants the federal and provincial governments will pay two-thirds of this amount or $878,666.00.
It will cost another Saskatchewan municipality approximately $10,000,000.00 for a Water Treatment Plant, with grant money covering $6,375,708.00.
These costs are projected costs, yet these projects are necessary for these municipalities to properly provide services to their prospective municipalities.
Thankfully grants are available, with cost-sharing measures to ease the financial burden to the municipality. If you can find the grant you then the next step is filling out the forms.
These application forms are getting more and more complicated and lengthy (some are upwards of 50-plus pages) and take up a lot of time and effort to locate the proper grant.
There are pages upon pages of government grants available for everything from the Federal Gas Tax Fund to Municipal Funding Success Stories.
Grant writing has become an art form, with the skills of an investigator to search out the government websites.
To know and understand what a municipality requires while locating the appropriate grant is an undertaking in itself.
Yet these are the skills needed by every municipality to secure funding for their projects and operational costs.
This massive search and time-consuming task usually fall upon on municipal clerks who do a fantastic job.
Many municipal administrators have a lot of the skills required to acquire grants for the municipality in this time-consuming endeavour.
If it wasn’t for this hard work a lot of our major projects would never be accomplished, the ability as a grant writer is a definite asset.
The grant writer position is something many school divisions and municipalities employ and the return on investment is often ten-fold to their salary.
Four-Town Journal