My Account
Rodney residents will have an opportunity to voice their support for reinstating community grants during a month-long consultation that begins at the end of this month.
Rodney Local Board and Auckland Council will seek public submissions on their respective draft budgets from February 28 to March 28.
During this financial year (July 2017 to June 2018), the Board ditched its previous practice of inviting community groups to apply for grants to further community projects.
Rodney Local Board Chair Beth Houlbrooke says the old system put applicants through an arduous process to secure a grant and necessitated further hours of work by the Board to determine what grants it would approve.
She says quite often the cost of processing the application for smaller grants of, say, $500, could easily outweigh the value of the grant.
“It wasn’t the most efficient way of distributing money to the community,” she says.
Moreover, upon investigation it turned out that nearly all the approved grants over the previous three years related to environmental projects.
Applications concerned with other kinds of projects seldom met Local Board guidelines.
For these reasons, the Board elected to discard the grant system in favour of establishing several large funds, totalling $630,000, to further environmental initiatives.
These initiatives are: restoring riparian waterways, design of cycleways and walkways, and the purchase of play and exercise equipment for parks.
Generally, these targeted funds cannot be disbursed via public grant applications.
In addition to community grants, the public will have the opportunity to make submissions on all other areas of Board and Council policy as documented in their respective draft budgets to be released on February 28.
Details of how to make submissions will be relayed through radio and newspaper advertising, including in Mahurangi Matters, and Our Auckland magazine – distributed to all households.
Information will also appear on the Our Auckland website: ourauckland.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz
