Council for the Rural Municipality of Hanover has thrown its support behind a request for increased funding for water and sewer infrastructure. The Manitoba Municipal Administrators has started an advocacy effort, attempting to have at least 100 municipalities sign on to their lobby efforts. The plan is to then attempt to influence our provincial government's budget discussions, informing the province of the overwhelming need in Manitoba. According to the Manitoba Municipal Administrators, the Manitoba Water Services Board (MWSB) has been oversubscribed with project requests from municipalities. Its annual budget is $24 million. It says that with a 50 per cent cost share, this results in delivering about $50 million in water and sewer infrastructure annually. Manitoba Municipal Administrators claims that in 2025, MWSB received 346 individual project applications from 103 municipalities and water cooperatives, excluding the City of Winnipeg. The total estimated cost of all project applications is $1.35 billion. It also says that many rural municipalities generally do not have the expertise and staffing resources to manage their own government funding-assisted water and wastewater projects and heavily rely on MWSB's technical and financial staffing resources to act on a municipality's behalf. Manitoba Municipal Administrators will also be lobbying for an increase in MWSB staffing levels to support the budget increase. However, the core premise is to increase MWSB's annual capital budget from $24 million to $100 million. On Wednesday afternoon, Hanover Council passed a resolution which stated that "the vast majority of Manitoba municipalities are in dire need of the Manitoba Water Services Board financial, professional, and/ or related subject matter expertise assistance for every aspect of water and wastewater projects and initiatives." The resolution goes on to say that "the provincial economy, municipal residential and commercial growth, community development opportunities, climate resiliency, public health, and convergent federal or provincial programs are at serious risk of being postponed, cancelled, or sub optimally advanced because the MWSB is critically oversubscribed with projects and at current funding levels has a seriously compromised financial capability to complete even a fraction of the queued projects required to drive local prosperity, health, safety, and livability." "We have infrastructure that is aging," says Hanover Reeve Jim Funk, explaining why they are supporting this advocacy effort. He notes one of the projects that comes to mind is in Grunthal where their lift stations could use some attention. He adds there are also water concerns in Kleefeld where a water plant could address some of the issues with the coloured water in the community. Even though Hanover Council approved the resolution, Funk notes that water and sewer upgrades are not the only infrastructure concerns in the municipality. He says there are other infrastructure needs in Hanover, including road upgrades. "We can always use funding for roads," he adds. "The infrastructure world is large and there's a lot of cost in it."