Courtenay could be in the running for a $50,000 grant from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to further the city’s asset management work.
David Love, the city’s senior advisor of strategic initiatives, told council “this is a good news story.”
The grant program is one that Courtenay contributed to by interacting with the FCM.
“No one, including ourselves, knew when this program was going to actually be provided,” he said.
Now that it has, the city has confirmed with FCM that it’s qualified to participate in the program and “the likelihood of success is considered good”.
If the city’s grant application is indeed approved, the money will off-set total costs of the Courtenay Land Disposition and Acquisition Strategy.
The city has already committed up to $150,000 from the 2017 financial plan toward the costs of this initiative.
Federal Gas Tax funding was going to be the main financial source for the work. If successful, the FCM grant will allow the city to retain $50,000 of existing Gas Tax funds that would otherwise have been spent on the project.
The city has already completed the first phase of the project, a detailed land inventory.
The result of this first step is that the city for the first time has a detailed, statutory compliant, geographical information data base of all the city’s lands and improvements.
This includes 17 land use categories, 2,413, 396 square metres of land, distributed in 358 different parcels.
“Now we’ve got an actual GIS representation of every lick of land the city owns,” Love said. “We’ve identified its type, its use, what may or may not be done with it. We’ve finally, for the first time, got all that in one place … at a bargain level.”
The next steps will be completion of a highest and best use analysis, followed by short, medium and long-term prospects identified by the project contractor.
The last phase is a disposition process and marketing protocol plus revenue stream and allocation process to advance the city’s asset management program.
Counc. Erik Eriksson noted that the city’s staff “is in the forefront of the asset management movement.”
“I’m very proud of what our staff is doing,” he added.
