This week's Councillor Column is written by Lomond North independent councillor George Freeman.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Until recently, the Supporting Communities Fund was known as Third Sector Grants and applications for funding from community groups were considered by councillors at area committee meetings.

All that changed when the council recently decided that this small budget of £24,500 – plus £3,572 that was carried forward from 2017/18 – should be dealt with under the Scottish Government’s Participatory Budgeting system where the administration costs could be more than the funding available.

This system allows the public to vote for projects to decide which applications would be successful in receiving funding.

Although it is another two years before the council has to comply with the Participatory Budgeting system, for some reason, the council decided to jump the gun and bring it in two years early.

I have argued strongly that the system that the council was using discriminated against our smaller rural communities as no weighting factor was included to ensure that applications from the larger towns did not have an unfair advantage due to their larger populations.

I know that some other councillors will now argue that my fears were unfounded as, in the main, it was rural applications that were successful and it was applications from Helensburgh that lost out as they did not secure sufficient votes to secure the funding they were seeking.

This only happened due to a concerted effort by community groups and others within our rural communities. Although council officers had been encouraging the public, when voting, to allocate all the funding that was available, I and others urged residents in our rural communities only to vote for rural projects and not to vote for Helensburgh projects.

The only exception to this was for those applications that could have a Lomond wide impact such as the Bicentenary Pipe Band Championship and the Helensburgh and Lomond Autism application.

As it was explained to those in our rural communities, to allocate votes for projects in Helensburgh was to increase the votes against projects in our rural communities.

It was unfortunate that we had to encourage people not to vote for Helensburgh projects, but that was the only way that we could try and ensure that those projects from our rural communities were successful in securing funding.

It is most unfortunate that the council introduced a system that pitched communities against each other. Back to the drawing board?