After nearly four years without funding from the Regional District, the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark and Tumbler Ridge Museum are finally getting their funding back.
According to Geopark director Manda Maggs, in 2020, the Peace River Regional District (PRRD) did an internal review of their bylaws. “They realized that their bylaws for the grant in aid function didn’t actually include Tumbler Ridge as a community, which meant that organizations in Tumbler Ridge weren’t eligible to receive grant in aid funding from the PRRD,” says Maggs. “It was obviously just an oversight, but we had been receiving grant and aid funding for a few years already. They decided that in order to follow their own bylaws they were going to have to do some amendments.”
So the PRRD created two new service functions to support the Museum and the Geopark. In October, 2022, both of these functions were brought before the region to be voted on. Both the functions easily passed, but the vote happened two weeks after the deadline for a function to be established for the next year. This meant both organizations had to sit around for an extra 15 months without funding
Indeed, Maggs says it will still be a few weeks before they get their funding. “We had to apply for an advance, because normally these funds would be released later on in the year. So just to avoid cash flow issues, we have applied for an advance, which will be released in April.”
Over the last few years, says Maggs, the Geopark has not been functioning at the level she was hoping. “We’ve definitely had limited capacity and we’ve really tightened our belts. It definitely makes things take longer because you can’t hire a project manager, you can’t hire a coordinator or someone to actually implement things we already had on the go. Instead, those projects were put on to our regular staff, who had to do them in addition to their primary job functions. Staff has performed incredibly well under that kind of pressure, but this money hopefully will mean that we can do things that we had to cut or put on hold.”
What sort of things? Maggs says it’s hard to do staff training when they don’t have additional staff to cover, as one example. “We didn’t have the capacity or the time to take three or four days off to go do a comprehensive First Aid course, for instance. Hopefully what this funding will mean is that we can have a little bit more room to catch up on those things because we’re behind on getting our staff trained up. Also, there’s certain projects that we’ve got conceived and partly funded that we really want to do because it helps us maintain our UNESCO status, but we just haven’t been able to move forward with them because we’ve been hustling for funding. The District of Tumbler Ridge came through with some bridge funding to help stop that gap. It wasn’t the full amount or anything, but it definitely kept us afloat and kept us from completely halting operations. Hopefully, this means some of those projects that have been sort of sitting on the shelf this whole time will finally get the go-ahead to move forward.”
Some of those projects include bringing in more researchers. “I’m really hoping to be able to bring back some more of our scientific programs this year where we bring in researchers and have them come to the Geopark and do real field work. We’ve had classes come out and do everything from anthropology to alpine botany. These are the kind of things that we really should be doing as a Geopark but we kind needed that extra room to be able to do that well. It’s also a really good opportunity for our partners at the University of Northern British Columbia and the University of Alberta. They need places to take their students to do their field work. Here in Tumbler Ridge we’ve got lots of different biodiversity and geodiversity. We’ve got interesting features to study, which they can fit in either with their thesis projects or as an independent study. It opens up an opportunity for students as well to come here and do some of that work.”
Above photo: The new Geo Interpretive Centre is one of the projects the Geopark is hoping to finish, now that funding is available.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.