Grant applications totalling £15,500 will be put before the Smalltown and Dullbridge (SaD) Town Council Finance and Misappropriation Committee tonight.
During the 2022/23 financial year the grant budget totalled £32,300 but that didn’t prevent the Finance and Misappropriation Committee from handing out grants totalling £36,246. This year the budget has again been set at £32,000 but it remains to be seen if members of the F&M Committee have discovered how to use their calculators since September 2022.
This year, in order to reduce the number of applications , SaD Town Council didn’t publicise the availability of grants in the hope that only a handful of requests would be received. This new secret approach seems to have paid off, with only applicants who were in the know or who are friends of BeFuddled Party members applying.
So far this year grants have been awarded to three Celebratory Coronation events, totalling £1150, including £500 given to Smalltown’s Most Popular Person (Dullbridge Public Enemy No.1) and BeFuddled Party Councillor Jock McCads for his Celebratory Coronation Celebration Party (CCCP).
Cllr McCads will be asking his fellow BeFuddled Party Town Councillors for a further £3,000 of grant funding for his Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties, which will be split between the costs of running three events. A Smalltown Party in Chateau Gardens to be held in June, at a cost of £1250, the Smalltown Picnic in Chateau Gardens in July at a cost of £1250 and THE CCCP in May, at a cost of £500.
(Ed – I’m no mathematician, but hasn’t Cllr McCads already applied for and received the £500 for the CCCP?
He has, yes, but I think this is a different £500.
Ed – So in total he will receive £3500?
Yes.)
In previous years, Cllr McCads has had to include an event in Dullbridge to receive funding, but as everyone knows he isn’t remotely interested in Dullbridge, despite being Chair of the Chamber of Business Benefiting the Local Economy in Dullbridge (COBBLED). It is unlikely that his BeFuddled Party friends will apply the same condition.
Meanwhile Headmistress, Mayor and Dictator has been busy encouraging contacts for her own pet projects to apply for funding.
Central Eco Ltd has applied for a grant of £2500 so that the company can tell residents what they already know about ways to save both money and the planet as part of Dictator Dullard’s Climate Rescue Action Plan (CRAP), despite CRAP already having a separate budget of £5000 to cover these costs and the company accounts showing a current balance of £31,000.
An application from Dictator Dullard’s favourite charity Anywhere Else for a grant of £2500 will also be considered. Anywhere House has already benefitted from the sum of around £4000 from Cllr Dullard’s recent Gala Ball and currently has money in the bank totalling over £122,000.
Although the application comes from the charitable arm of Anywhere Else, it should be noted that the Chair of Trustees is also a Director of Anywhere Else PLC, which owns and operates the charity’s main base as well as a number of other properties locally, receiving remuneration from the charity to do so. The Chair of Trustees and her husband received over £200K of remuneration from Anywhere Else PLC in its last accounts, suggesting that charity should begin Anywhere Else than the SaD Town Council Grants Budget.
Former illiberal Councillor Jane NotBothered infamously suggested a different local mental health charity was voraciously consuming public funds during a SaD grant meeting five years ago when it kept returning for grant funding every year. Despite all this, and because Anywhere Else received similar funding last year and in the previous five financial years, it is fully expected that Councillors will follow Dictator Dullard’s directions and award further funding this year.
Meanwhile, a theatre company which isn’t in either Smalltown or Dullbridge has also applied for Smalltown and Dullbridge money. Bark Theatre Company, based in the nearby village of Bark is asking for £2500 of money contributed to SaDTC Council coffers by residents of Smalltown and Dullbridge.
The application states that the Bark Theatre Company has hired the White Elephant Enclosure for their show in previous years, but last year they held their event in Easton-under-Water’s Makehay Theatre.
A claim is also made that “all our members live in the local area”, but fails to clarify how the residents of Smalltown and Dullbridge will benefit from paying for a theatre group who are based in a nearby village.
However, despite not fulfilling SaDTC’s criteria of being a ‘Group within the Town Council’s area’ it is expected that the grant will be approved because it mentions the words “White Elephant Enclosure”.
Whether the Finance and Misappropriation Committee will ‘grow a pair’ and refuse some of these inappropriate grants, leaving more funds in the pot for the September round of applications, remains to be seen, but is highly unlikely.
.