The panel dealing with the community grant funding from the TravelSMART money coming to Westborough met at St Francis Church on Monday evening.  We had a series of meetings running up to this and Monday was the day we decided on giving sums of money to groups under the Small Community Grants.

I am the chairman of the panel which is made up of people living and working in Westborough.  In the earlier meetings we worked on the criteria for assessing applications for the Small Community Grants and how we should get the message out to groups in the community.  We needn’t have worried.  We had £12500 available to give out in this round with the biggest sum to be given out being £3000 and the bids we received added up to more than that.  That gave us a difficult task.  All the bids were very good but we didn’t have enough money for all of them.  It took a long and detailed discussion before we came to our decision.  The groups will be notified by County Council officers about the outcome of the discussions.

The next round of grants is for the bigger sums of money and this time will be decided by a community budgeting process.  We are going to hold an event in October where schemes bidding for money will be able to explain their bids to Westborough residents who will then get a vote on which they think should go ahead.

Then there will be another round of small bids in January again up to £3000 per bid.

The TravelSMART funding is available for three years, including this year.