Two quick suggestions

Editorial by Jeff Green

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They say free advice is worth twice as much as it costs.

So here is some free advice for Frontenac County.

County council should have nine members, two members from each township and an extra member from South Frontenac, in recognition of the fact that 60% of Frontenac County residents live in South Frontenac.

The four mayors should be included on county council, as they are now, and the other members can be chosen in any way the individual townships see fit to choose them.

The council would have an odd number of members, which avoids tie votes, and this makeup would recognise that the bulk of county taxpayers live in South Frontenac without giving it the kind of authority to over-ride the wishes of the other townships.

My second bit of advice is that Roads 38, 509, 506, and Perth Road should become county roads, in name only.

This will make no difference in how the roads are maintained or in who maintains them, but it would mean they are paid for out of county taxes.

This is the way things are done in Lennox and Addington, to the benefit of the ratepayers in the less populated northern townships who simply don't have enough ratepayers to keep up these downloaded arterial roads.

The advantage to this scenario would be that the county would then own some expensive infrastructure. County staff could be put to work finding grant money to pay for these roads, and the bridges that go over them, which is something township staff don't have time to do.

More directly, it would mean that infrastructure money that the county has already received from the provincial and federal government could be put to use on infrastructure.

Just this month, the county allocated $1.3 million in provincial money on soft infrastructure, a quarter of a million dollars to try and develop the K&P trail, a half a million on broadband internet, two hundred thousand on undefined future “green projects”.

The county is also sitting on millions of dollars in federal gas tax funding, which is supposed to be allocated to sustainable infrastructure. Bringing roads up to a better standard fits this definition, according to a representative from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the agency that administers gas tax funding.

One of the core functions of municipal governments is to keep up the roads, and the major roads come first. Most of us use them every day to get to work. The safety of these roads is a concern to all of us.

If county grant money is continually spent on projects that, although they might be laudable, are not part of the core business of municipal governments, we all end up paying higher municipal taxes because the maintenance and improvements to major roads simply must be done.

I hate to say this, but roads trump trails, and real highways trump the electronic super highway.