Why not?

The Lakeshore running track at CML Snider is the only facility of its kind in Prince Edward County. It’s more than 30 years old and it is beginning to disintegrate—crumbling at the edges and potholes forming in the running lanes. Thousands of County kids and athletes from the region use the facility several times each year. As I said, it is the only regulation running track in the County.

Left to the school board, the track might well disintegrate further until it is unsafe. In an era of declining enrolments schools are reluctant to spend money to fix old facilities.

Other institutions aren’t much help either. The County’s Recreation, Parks and Culture Department has a stake in the future of the track as the facility serves a much wider swath of the community than young athletes. From March to November the track is busy most evenings with residents young and old simply trying to stay fit. Yet County officials have no money to maintain this public facility.

So it has fallen to a handful of residents to fight for the salvation of this track—a couple of former educators and a parent who would like to see her kids remain active. Together they have vowed to raise a third of the $120,000 needed to resurface the track—preserving the facility for at least another decade or more.

The group has worked countless hours urging both the public school board and the municipality to step up and agree to pay a third of the cost. Neither institution has yet said no—but neither do they have a green light. The work is scheduled to begin this spring.

The fate of the Lakeshore track will be decided in the coming weeks as both the school board and municipality hammer out budgets for 2011.

This story, or a variation of it, is told a dozen times each year throughout the County. A group of parents sit around a table in Demorestville and ask: wouldn’t it be good if we restored the outdoor rink? Around another kitchen table, a different group asks themselves why they have to bring their kids to Belleville to play soccer? At another table some folks figure they have most of the pieces to put together a high calibre music/theatre/visual arts program and they ask themselves: why not?

This is what volunteering looks like in Prince Edward County—it’s ordinary folks looking around, identifying a gap in the community and offering their time and energy to make it happen. Elsewhere, these services and programs are simply there. But in rural communities, recreation and culture wouldn’t happen unless some individuals asked themselves: why not?

Each year these folks line up at Shire Hall and wait for their opportunity to make a pitch to council for some financial assistance or access to facilities and services. Typically they are looking for a few thousand dollars. They’ve already raised a pile of money elsewhere. They’ve done all the legwork, navigated bureaucracies at various levels of government, often to learn that senior governments or institutions won’t help out unless the local municipality does too.

Next Tuesday is the day council has set aside to make these volunteers jump through their hoops and beg for money. In past years council has whittled away the better part of a day considering these pleas.

In recent years, if council had granted each and every request—which it hasn’t—it would be spending less than $100,000 total for the year—about three days of operating expense for the County’s Public Works Department.

Yet council is perennially caught in the trap of fighting over which volunteer group initiative is more worthy than another. They spend the day arguing over nickels and dimes—and the volunteers sit in the pews gaining a poorer view of how their council works.

And council makes this mistake year after year. They simply don’t understand how good they have it. A group of residents is standing before them willing and able to build a facility, or offer a service or program that they can’t. This group has already gathered the bulk of the funds and they will do the work. All council must do is invest a few thousand dollars and they gain a rink, an event, a tourist draw, a service or track it could never afford on its own. Strictly on a return-on-investment basis, the community grant programs have been richly rewarding to this County. It should be an easy decision.

Yet councils in the past have figured they were doing their job by saying no to volunteers seeking a thousand dollars— while saying yes to staff who asking for millions.

Initial signals suggest that this year’s County budget will be punishing to taxpayers and users of municipal services. This will prompt some on Council to panic and begin hacking and slashing at everything in sight. It is into this snarling snakepit that the volunteers seeking funds through the community grant program are being thrust next Tuesday.

But council must resist the urge to make volunteers pay for the mismanagement of local governments of the past. These volunteers didn’t rack up the County’s debt, nor did they neglect the aging infrastructure. Even by eliminating funding to each and every community group they would do nothing to fix the financial problems that weigh this municipality down—but it would make the County a poorer place to live.

So here is a suggestion: rather than make these volunteers feel like beggars when they come next week and sending them home without an answer, here is what I propose. Come out from behind the council table and say thank you to these folks for working to make this community a better place. Then arrange for a clerk to be in an adjoining room and cut these folks a cheque on the way out.

Then go back to the council table and figure out how to save millions rather than nickels and dimes.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca