Addington Highlands to continue with afternoon meetings

Craig Bakay | Dec 11, 2019

It was a fairly light agenda for Addington Highlands Council at its regular meeting Tuesday afternoon in Flinton, said Reeve Henry Hogg.

“We spent most of our time in closed session because we have a union contract with roads employees coming up but I can’t talk about that,” Hogg said.

“We did have a request to change our meeting times to the evening but we decided not to change,” he said. “The idea is to make it more attractive for people who work during the day to attend but we don’t have a lot of interest in coming to our meetings.

“If there’s something that affects somebody, they’ll come.”

And speaking of meetings, Hogg said they did set their schedule for 2020 with the first meeting set for Jan. 14 at 1 p.m. in Flinton.

“We still have one more meeting this year, in Denbigh at 1 p.m.,” he said “We’ll be looking at current budget adjustments.”

Hogg said there was discussion and some concern over correspondence from the Ministry of Health regarding Public Health Modernization and in particular, Emergency Health Services Modernization.

“We have concerns if they create a mega-health team out of Kingston that there won’t be much consideration for rural areas,” he said. “I did note there was talk about ambulance services but some of those changes were proposed years ago by the Niagara Region and disregarded.

“Of course that was a different government.”

As far as health services go, Hogg doesn’t see much changing for the rural areas.

“For us, we’ve always had an issue with doctor attraction and retention,” he said. “We do have an arrangement with North Frontenac to create incentives to attract doctors but we haven’t had much success.

“Of course if they create something based in Kingston, there’ll probably be less incentive for doctors to come here.”

Finally, Hogg said he was pleased to see work begin on the office addition in Flinton.

“It’s just getting started,” he said. “Fences are up, propane tanks are in place and they’re looking at where to relocate the hydro poles.

“We’ll have to use the disabled entrance while construction is going on and that will be awhile.

“These things take time.”