Pushing for the last few years to see municipalities work more efficiently, the province has been providing funding for administrative functions. Local townships are among the recipients who’ll share in $28 million from the Municipal Modernization Program (MMP).
Wellesley will receive funding to update its budget software and to implement an enterprise planning system, while both Woolwich and Wilmot townships will get money to help update their records management systems.
Funding amounts for individual projects are expected to be announced later this month.
“This round of funding will support the Townships of Wellesley, Wilmot, and Woolwich in updating services to make life more convenient and accessible for families and businesses in our communities,” said Kitchener-Conestoga MPP Mike Harris during last week’s announcement of the latest round of funding. “The Municipal Modernization Program will go a long way in ensuring that local services are modernized and sustainable long into the future.”
The money was welcomed by Woolwich officials.
“As you can imagine the Township has thousands of records that have historically been paper-based. The objective in this project is to digitize our records which will allow staff to access records without having the need to physically be on sight to retrieve or view these records,” said director of finance Richard Petherick.
“We started this program last year and were planning to continue digitizing our records this year. Being successful in this grant will allow us to continue with this program at a much faster pace.”
Clerk and director of corporate services Jeff Smith said the ongoing digitization project has staff prioritizing which documents will be converted.
“We’ve got lots of older paper records. We’re looking at digitizing a lot of them, especially ones that are going to be most useful, the ones that we would be most likely to access,” he said.
“Right now, requests to the corporate services department [mean] we have to go down in the basement of the admin building, and pull some boxes to find the records you’re looking for. We’re hoping to bring all that digital, so you just do a key keyword search in our database.
“It’s a process that we’re quite excited about. We’re really hoping it’ll lead to efficiencies.”
