Prince William County officials unveiled a process for funding community nonprofit groups and requiring stricter reporting standards.
Also, for the first time, budget officials streamed the session Thursday online.
Budget director Michelle Casciato outlined a process for funding nonprofit groups that observers said is more transparent and holds organizations more accountable. Casciato said budget officials have been working on the standards over the past two years.
The changes come at a time when the county’s way of funding nonprofit groups has come under scrutiny. In June, supervisors banned the practice of allocating discretionary funds, small donations to nonprofit groups that some criticized as using taxpayer money to generate political goodwill for individual board members.
This month, the Board of County Supervisors rejected a measure from Supervisor Peter K. Candland (R-Gainesville) that would have required members and their spouses to disclose their involvement with nonprofit groups.
The new process requires organizations to submit their public tax returns to the county, sign a memorandum of understanding and file audited financial statements.
The organizations’ activities must directly support the goals of county departments, Casciato said. If organizations re-apply for funding, they must submit a list of “performance measures” they achieved in the last fiscal year.
Casciato said groups that had historically been funded should not expect to get money from year to year.
“We continue to become more clear . . . in terms of what the organizations expect from us and what we expect from organizations,” Casciato said.
Kathy Bentz was at Thursday’s meeting representing the Americans in Wartime Museum, a group seeking to build a museum in Dale City honoring war veterans. Museum leaders withdrew a request for county funding this month, when the organization’s chairman decried the politicization of nonprofit funding in Prince William.
Bentz said Thursday’s meeting, which is available online, encouraged transparency. “I think that’s a fair and open way to do this process,” Bentz said.
Sallie Eissler, who volunteers for the Pediatric Primary Care Project, which helps low-income children receive health care, said she was proud of the changes to the process.
“It makes me feel like when I see money that’s funded to a nonprofit, it’s going to be spent wisely,” she said.
For information, visit www.pwcgov.org/cp.
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