(Photo: SBRC)
March 25, 2013
A policy change in the Department of Communities will bring a major change of focus to the NDRRA Flexible Funding Program which is being administered by the South Burnett Regional Council.
In future, the Council will need to submit projects that promote disaster preparedness, not disaster recovery.
After the 2011 floods, the South Burnett council was given $250,000 by the Department to give away in grants that would support the community’s “human and social recovery” as well as allow the region to be better prepared to respond to any future disasters.
The money was the South Burnett’s share of a $20 million state-wide program that is due to end on June 30 this year.
But in practice the program’s requirements proved so difficult to meet that last September the SBRC called for them to be loosened.
To date, the Council has only been able to spend $175,000 of the grant money.
At this month’s meeting, though, Councillors heard that in light of the 2013 Australia Day floods the Department has changed its focus.
It now wants to see any remaining funds spent on projects that assist disaster preparedness rather than disaster recovery.
Because of this change, the Council was forced to turn down a $19,500 application from the Wondai Art Gallery to stage a touring art exhibition that would have seen 24 new paintings produced by local artists exhibited in five major towns for five weeks in each.
Cr Barry Green, a long-time critic of the Flexible Funding Program, said because of the strict guidelines and the need to get the Department’s approval for any grant, he believed many genuinely worthwhile programs were being rejected.
He cited the Nanango Men’s Shed project as an example of this.
Cr Green told the meeting that a group of Nanango men had been trying to get a Men’s Shed group going for some time but had been unable to raise the necessary seed funding to get the project off the ground.
“The town needs a Men’s Shed because a lot of men in the community have taken a battering and men’s mental health is important to the resilience and recovery of communities,” he said.
“These Men’s Sheds are important to communities like ours, and I think the good that would come out of this group would be unbelievable.”
Cr Green said that Nanango High School had recently been given $1.2 million to upgrade its manual arts facilities and the old manual arts classroom was no longer being used.
He said the old classroom would be ideal for a Men’s Shed because it contains a lot of the equipment the group would use. All the group needed was $3000 to $4000 to get things running.
Mayor Wayne Kratzmann encouraged Cr Green to talk with Flexible Finding Committee chairman Cr Keith Campbell about the matter, saying that he thought the project would fit the guidelines.
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