RM of Stanley will put Basket Funding dollars to good use

Last month, the Provincial Government announced $47 million dollars in unconditional funding to Manitoba municipalities. 

Reeve Ike Friesen explained what this means for the RM of Stanley. 

"We're very grateful to the province of Manitoba, and to our local MLAs, and the AMM (Association of Manitoba Municipalities) who have worked on our behalf to get this additional funding in place for us and we will be putting it to good use. We'll be receiving an additional $405,000. At this point, we see that going right to our operating costs budget, where we've been seeing increases, like fuel and a lot of our different operating expenses." 

Friesen described how this money will be used. 

"Fuel was definitely a big one and with all our extra repairs that we had from flooding this last year, we used a lot more fuel and the extra snow we had, our costs were up considerably."  

He added municipalities are limited on ways to raise more funds amidst rising costs. 

"As a municipality, our only source of revenue is property tax, so that's not something that we can increase as quickly with the extra costs we incur. And so, we really rely on government grants to keep us afloat. And also, for large capital projects we always rely heavily on the different grants available, and this is an additional funding that we will definitely put to use in those areas."