Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask the deputy minister, Mr. Dave Murray, to respond to that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This project was deemed to be higher priority then two trucks, I believe which were in Fort Good Hope. But because it is important for fire protection in the community and since they have had problems with the fire truck in Deline, it was deemed this was a higher priority project than the replacement water truck in Fort Good Hope, as well as the sewage truck.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will ask the deputy minister to respond to that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe this project was advanced because of the state of repair it was in. It was deemed to be a higher priority to move it rather than leaving it in a future year.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, whenever we have been asked to advance different projects or different assets for future years, I see it as work that we have to do in the future. I would certainly take that under consideration. I specifically do not know the conditions of the fire truck in Fort McPherson, so we will take that as notice and deal with it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the tax-based municipalities get an annual operations and maintenance budget, as well as a capital budget. We are going through a municipal financial review.

The block funding arrangements are three-year arrangements that took into consideration the operations and maintenance and the capital that was going to be identified for the three years of the block funding arrangement.

In some cases, if a capital project was not slated in those three years to one of these communities but is going to show up later on, it was included in the three-year block funding arrangement. Maybe the capital project slated for the three years is finished and they may not have anything for the next year or so.

Perhaps a community may not have any capital projects slated for the three-year capital, block-funding arrangement, but it may have slated for the next couple of years. That is not factored in. We have had an experiment with the block-funding arrangement. As a result of the anomalies that exist out there between the communities, this department is reviewing the block-funding arrangement.

Like I said, we hope to have it concluded by the end of March. We may have come out with some formula to try to determine how to fund the communities. But in the meantime, for this year we are going to carry over the arrangement we had for the last three years per year, subject to cuts.

We did write to the municipalities saying we are going to do it. We are going to roll over this year what we had last year. However, it is going to be subject to any cuts that may happen in the capital.

Yes, the Finance Minister said there was a $10 million cut that is spread out, including the capital portion of the tax-based municipalities. This is the reason for the cut in the tax-based municipality block-funding.

As to what each received, we have some information here on that. I am going to ask the director or corporate services, Gay Kennedy, to get into the details of what each municipality received last year. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yellowknife is funded $5,234,000, 1999-2000. Inuvik is $746,000. Fort Smith is $1,143,000. Hay River is $715,000. Fort Simpson is $2,395,000.