Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the Standing Committee on Governance and Economic Development met with the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs and his staff on January 14, 2005, to review the department's Draft Main Estimates for 2005-2006.
The mandate of MACA is to provide community governments with the support to deliver public programs and services essential to sound community life, to assist with the development and maintenance of community governments, and to provide the resources necessary to achieve community goals.
Arctic Winter Games
The Arctic Winter Games will be hosted by the NWT in 2008 and will provide an excellent opportunity for northern athletes to compete. The international committee will make an announcement late this spring as to whether Yellowknife or the South Slave will host the Arctic Winter Games. In 2005-06, MACA will be allocating funds to support the NWT's role as host for three fiscal years. The committee noted that funding for the Arctic Winter Games was missing from the MACA's draft main estimates and that the announcement with regards to funding will be made after the host community is chosen.
In the interest of transparency and accountability, the committee suggests the department announce funding for this initiative before the international committee makes their decision.
The New Deal
The new deal is a proposal from MACA to the communities which is to provide communities with greater control and decision-making over community infrastructure, including planning and decision-making for capital projects.
Capital projects can run into difficulty and require all kinds of expensive advice in the form of legal, engineering and contracts expertise, to name only a few. The committee is pleased to see that MACA is committed to working with the NWT Association of Communities, NWTAC, to make the new deal a graduated process for communities. The committee feels there needs to be a central pool of professionals for communities to access. Most importantly, communities also require guaranteed funding to help them budget for long-term capital projects.
Currently, although community government funding is based on a three-year projection, it is only guaranteed year-to-year because of the Financial Administration Act requirements.
The committee recommends that the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs continue to press the Financial Management Board Secretariat to find a means to guarantee multi-year funding for community infrastructure.
Municipal And Rural Infrastructure Funding
The Northwest Territories will receive $16 million towards green municipal infrastructure over four years, starting in 2005-06. After receiving this news, MACA has been working in partnership with the NWT Association of Communities to seek the association's input on priorities for application of the fund, as well as the application formula.
The funding will be devoted mainly to water and sewer repair. Fifty-five percent of the funding will go to non-tax-based communities and forty-five percent will go to the tax based communities, who MACA and the NWTAC feel are better able to fund their own projects.
Before any additional federal funding is announced, in the interests of transparency and accountability, the committee urges MACA to decide on and communicate in advance a fair and equitable approach to distributing funding. The approach should be based on criteria such as remoteness of a community, the cost of doing business in the community, the age of existing infrastructure, impact of population demand and the impact of resource development.
Granular Materials
There are many departments working in the various communities that have gravel requirements. Each department has to look after its own gravel requirements. There are roughly eight communities that require gravel for projects such as lot, airport and road development. In light of these requirements, the committee expressed concerns regarding MACA's proposed $250,000 budget cut to granular materials.
The committee is pleased to hear that rather than simply making this budget reduction, MACA will take the lead in determining all the departments that require the use of gravel in the different communities, their future requirements and how those will be met. The department advised it would have a plan for review within the next month.
That concludes our report. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.