Ten Manitoba communities will share over $442,000 in funding from the Municipal Asset Management Program (MAMP), which is being administered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) on behalf of the federal government.
“The program aims to strengthen local infrastructure planning and decision-making by increasing local asset management capacity through investments in activities such as asset management training, technology and software enhancements and information sharing,” states an FCM news release.
The R.M. of Wallace-Woodworth has been awarded a grant of $50,000 to assist with compilation of an asset management inventory, which Chief Administrative Officer Garth Mitchell said is required in order to qualify for federal gas tax revenue.
“It’s something that is kind of new to us in Manitoba,” Mitchell said. “Other jurisdictions have been doing it for awhile. We’ve already started to do some of our work in house – from vehicles and equipment to roads. All of that needs to be incorporated to into this.”
Mitchell said the funds will assist the municipality in bringing in a third-party consultant to assist where necessary in bringing the project to a conclusion.
“The federal money became available through FCM for us to apply for, so right now we’re envisioning that money to help us finalize a lot of our road inventory,” he said. “What that entails is going through a lot of the roads, classifying them, looking at what costs may be in the future to maintain what we have and also the investment we have in roads. Now that we’ve got the grant, we know what we have to work with so we’ll be putting out a request for proposals in the next few months (and) hopefully lining somebody up in 2021 to help us get the last pieces of this put together.”
The Municipal Asset Management Program offers funding, training and resources to help small and medium-sized municipalities improve their asset management policies and approaches, enabling them to make solid infrastructure investment decisions. The $110 million program has invested in more than 830 projects since its inception.
