Manitoba's Municipal Relations Minister made a stop in Steinbach Tuesday to find out what municipal leaders would like to see in a new strategic infrastructure investment approach.

Eileen Clarke says prior to the 2016 election, Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) asked for a fair say in how provincial funding dollars are spent.

"Our Premier took that very seriously," explains Clarke. "In my mandate letter I was mandated to work with our municipalities and within one hundred days to get this fair say perspective into a plan to go forward, and we did."

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(Tache Mayor Robert Rivard speaks Tuesday)Clarke says this has been a three part process. Part one involved discussions at June district meetings, part two was a survey that was sent out, and part three is a series of five round table discussions held across the province. Tuesday's stop in Steinbach was the fourth of five such meetings.

According to Clarke, the common theme at each of these meetings is that municipal leaders would like a fair say. She says municipalities would like to decide what their priorities are, how to use provincial funding and for funding to not be specific to a certain project.

Clarke says it is difficult to find one model that works for each municipality. She notes some municipalities have the capacity to do a lot more work than others, based on their tax base. And in that way, they would like to rather receive a "basket" of money to spend where they see fit.

AMM Vice-President Ralph Groening says they are excited to be truly involved in the consultation process. Having attended a couple of these meetings, Groening says a common theme has been the need for per capita funding, using an application based funding model. In that way, there would be less reliance on local dollars. He has also heard acknowledgement for regional consideration and regional cooperation in order to spend money more effectively.

"The comment was made (Tuesday) and I've heard it before that there's too many applications, too much work involved in our administration in completing application forms," notes Groening.

Another concern raised Tuesday was over application deadlines. Tache Mayor Robert Rivard says for some grants, timelines are not important. But he says often it would be nice to know whether they have been approved for funding, prior to finalizing their municipal budgets each spring.

"It will help us in our budget process," he says. "Because most of them are matching grants, so we have to budget dollars to match that grant that we don't know we're going to get."

Rivard admits he is amazed at how many different grants are available through the province.

"A lot of them that I'd never heard of," he says.

Further to that, he says some grants are so specific to a certain area, that most of the province wouldn't even qualify. In those cases, he says they shouldn't be labelled as provincial grants.

"A number of times the comment has been made, well we have never seen before how the province actually distributes and offers funds," says Groening. "The community leaders are saying, 'wow this is good, let's take a look at how the money is being distributed and maybe find a better way.'"

"We're definitely listening to our municipalities and that's part of this exercise," says Clarke. "We're taking everything into consideration between our municipalities in our province and we'll go from there."

Ideas from these surveys and round tables will be shared at AMM's annual convention in November.