The Back Roads Studio Tour ran on September 26 and 27, and the Township of North Frontenac gave it $1,000, the same as every year since 2021. That's the most any group that has to apply for a community grant can get. If you drove the tour, you drove past a thousand dollars of your own money.
The tour began in 2014 with fifteen artists, Frontenac News reported the next year. This fall its website listed twenty stops, one closed for illness, and about twenty-nine artists. Two of the stops were township halls, ClarMill Hall in Plevna and the Ompah Community Hall.
Council set that ceiling in February 2020. It has rewritten the grants policy since, and copied the figure across word for word each time. I read every year's grant resolution since 2021 in the township's minutes. The number hasn't moved once.
Meanwhile the money that needs no application has gone up. A list in the policy funds certain groups automatically through the budget, and when council rebuilt that list, several of those grants rose. The studio tour isn't on it. The list of groups that never have to ask keeps getting richer. So why is the ceiling on everybody else the one figure nobody revisits?
The artists built this tour themselves. Its 2024 application carried the only full budget it has ever put in front of council, handwritten on one page. On that page the artists put up $2,500, two and a half times our share, and it still ends in a deficit. In 2025 the organizers told council the artists were already buying the regular advertising, and asked the township only for part of the new signage. Since 2020 the tour's never asked for more than the ceiling.
When council met on May 21, thirteen groups' requests added up to more than the grants budget held. Staff offered a way to cover the gap from a reserve, and another to spread the shortage across the larger grants. The last, in staff's words, was to "Deny Applications to make fit within budget." Council took it.
Council refused the Clarendon Central Public School Parent Council about $610 for a classroom air conditioner, and turned down the Ompah Community Centre's request for topsoil. It trimmed the astronomy club and the Plevna Haunted Walk. The studio tour's full grant went through.
Three of the six members at the table had declared an interest and stood down. One was Councillor Fred Fowler. The tour stops at his studio in Snow Road Station, and his declaration named the tour itself. The grants pass as one motion, so a member with an interest in one line is out of the vote on all of them. Provincial law lets the rest carry on, and this year that left three members to hand out the whole grants budget.
The policy requires a final report from every group that gets a community grant, to help council judge whether the grants work, and every application the tour has signed promises one. The township's grants page publishes the blank form and nothing filled in.
No township record, in any year, says how many people came.
Councillor Fred Fowler is a certified candidate in the October 26 election, acclaimed in Ward 3.