Councillors given options for changing HCI funds

City councillors will be considering three options for reforming Greater Sudbury's controversial ward funds when they meet Tuesday.

The Healthy Community Initiative funds, as they are formally known, provides $50,000 a year for each of the city's 12 wards for local projects. The funds are controversial because councillors have direct spending control over the money, and there's no tracking of which requests are denied and why.

However, much tighter policies related to when and on what the money can be spent were approved in 2012, and some councillors have argued the money is an important means to get local projects off the ground, motivate volunteers in the ward and leverage grant money from upper levels of government.

Several volunteer groups from wards across the city made pitches to save the funds at a public input session last month, and an online survey found most participants favoured keeping the funds in some form.

Ward 12 Coun. Joscelyne Landry-Altmann has argued HCI funds are especially important to lower-income wards, where renovating parks and providing seed money for neighbourhood initiatives can make a huge difference.

On Tuesday, councillors will review a report that provides three options for the future of the ward funds:

The first option would maintain HCI and keep spending control with politicians, but administration of the funds would be transferred to the community partnerships division of Leisure Services.

The second option gives an array of choices to reform the way the funds are spent, including taking away spending control from politicians for smaller expenditures, creating a separate committee to handle funding requests, eliminating some categories of eligible expenses, imposing tougher restrictions for spending in election years and making the reporting of how the money is spent more transparent and accessible.

The third option would abolish HCI altogether and redirect the $602,763 already approved in the budget to related projects.

Councillors can approve any of the options, or come up with some of their own.