Arts Festival
The annual Sechelt Arts Festival is dealing with a drop in overall funding of about $9,500, resulting in the loss of a few programs that were originally on tap for the festival scheduled to run Oct. 13 to 23.
“It was a very challenging year,” arts festival producer Nancy Cottingham Powell told councillors during the Sept. 14 finance, culture and economic development committee meeting.
She said the festival lost four event sponsors this year and a grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage was cut by $5,200, resulting in the funding shortage.
“But the good news is we’ve managed to balance the budget versus programming,” Cottingham Powell said, noting a hip-hop workshop and performance were cut as well as the Gillian the Jellyfish project and an art in the street program that was her “personal favourite.”
“That was, you know, like having to kill the baby, but sometimes that’s necessary and I’m sure we’ll bring it back again when times are better.”
The total budget for this year’s Sechelt Arts Festival is $119,915, which will still allow for a plethora of free programming during the 10-day event.
See the entire lineup and get more information at www.secheltartsfestival.com.
Financial plan
Sechelt council has started discussing its 2017 budget and councillors want to dig deeper into the numbers than has been the practice in the past.
Mayor Bruce Milne said many members of council would like to see the line items for individual departmental budgets in order to get a better sense of what actually makes up the multi-million-dollar budget they pass each year.
“[Seeing the line items] wasn’t available in our first or second budgets, so here we are mid-term and this council is not actually familiar with the line items,” Milne said, noting council has asked in the past to see the line items but was told it wasn’t possible.
“I won’t try to micromanage what staff is doing, but it’s an approach that some of us are familiar with in budgeting … I guess the question is, can we find a place and a role for council in that process?”
Director of financial services Doug Stewart said council could definitely look at the line items over several meetings but noted it would slow down the entire budget process.
Milne said staff didn’t need to necessarily take a long time going through every departmental budget line by line in committee meetings, but he wanted the line items to be made available to council for their perusal.
He said councillors had requested to look at the line items in the past but were “flatly refused” the first year and “pushed back because of resources” in the second year.
“Here we are going into the third budget for this council and it’s simply not appropriate that the mayor and individual committee members can’t and have not had access to at least review, circle things and give them back,” Milne said, noting some kind of mechanism would have to be found for the 2017 budget.
“The kind of financial reports this mayor has not seen in the [past] 18 months is appalling and that’s got to change.”
Stewart said a detailed look at line items would be facilitated, however he hoped in the future council would trust staff to scrutinize the numbers themselves.
– Christine Wood, Senior Staff Writer
