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Wednesday, 26 February 2020 12:45

Trail for sale?

Frontenac County is hoping to take over the K&P trail between Sharbot Lake and the North Frontenac border. The trail section is owned by Central Frontenac Township.

The county has plans to upgrade the trail to make it as accessible as the 55km K&P trail section that was completed last fall between the county border with the City of Kingston and Sharbot Lake.

The K&P line north of Sharbot Lake was purchased by Oso Township sometime in the 1980’s. Central Frontenac Mayor (and Frontenac County Warden for 2020) Frances Smith remembers the purchase because she was the clerk for Oso Township at the time.

“As I recall, it was Marathon Realty, the real estate arm of Bell Canada, who owned it. I think they told us to name our price, since they didn’t want it anymore. We offered something like $5,000, and it was a done deal. But I’m not exactly sure about the date or the cost. It was a long time ago,” she said.

The trail has been used by snowmobiles, ATV’s, walkers, runners, cross country skiers, and cyclists, ever since, and a number of people access their seasonal and permanent dwellings from it.

The trail has many interesting features. It straddles four waterways (Sharbot Lake, Black Lake, Little Round Lake and Bolton Creek) runs through a culvert under Hwy. 7, passes major rock cuts, some swampland and thick woods, before reaching Clarendon Road and the only station on the old K&P line that is still standing.

It is maintained in a limited fashion by the township under a contract with the Eastern Ontario Trails Alliance (EOTA), and is groomed by the Snow Road Snowmobile Club in the winter time.

“We haven’t really invested much in it. When issues are brought to us, about trees over the trail or other maintenance matters, we call EOTA and they make arrangements to deal with the problem,” said Smith. “Other than that, we have basically left it alone since we bought it.”

The trail floods sometimes in the spring, and where it passes over open, swampy land, it is pretty rough, but passable.

All of these trail maintenance issues are familiar to the Economic Development department at Frontenac County, which has worked for years to forge a continuous trail to Sharbot Lake from the border with the City of Kingston.

With that project complete, the county plans to upgrade the existing trail between Sharbot Lake and the old station at Clarendon Road this summer, but they need ownership of that section of trail in order to work on it.

Central Frontenac Township inherited the trail when it absorbed Oso township in 1998.

At their meeting last Wednesday (February 20), Frontenac County approved a motion, put forward by staff requesting that the trail north of Sharbot Lake be conveyed to them in order to enable them to work on it.

“With construction planned for later this year on the Frontenac K&P Trail from the Village of Sharbot Lake to Clarendon Station in 2020, it is staff recommendation that ownership of these lands be transferred from the Township of Central Frontenac to the County of Frontenac. As the primary investor in the infrastructure, it is in the County’s best interest to own, maintain and manage the improved asset to ensure long-term sustainability of the infrastructure,” said the staff report accompanying the motion.

It will be up to Central Frontenac Council to decide if they want to convey the trail to the county.

“Should the Township of Central Frontenac respond affirmative to this request, a detailed review of the properties will be undertaken prior to a legal agreement and conveyance.”

In a phone interview Frances Smith said that the matter has not yet been raised at the Central Frontenac Council table and she cannot speak for Council, but she did not see, on the face of it, any reason for her council to raise any major objections.

“The county wants to Improve it and make it more accessible to our residents and visitors alike, and take over responsibility for maintenance.”

Frontenac County has budgeted money to upgrade for the 14km. section between the trailhead in Sharbot Lake and Clarendon Station, this year, so the conveyance needs to be completed shortly.

Published in CENTRAL FRONTENAC

If you’re a senior in Frontenac County, chances are you’ve gotten one of those phone calls. You know the ones — somebody’s going to make you rich or the “bank” needs some information or heaven forbid, if you don’t tell the caller what they want to know, you’re going to jail.

North Frontenac Coun. Fred Perry’s gotten them too, as well as questionable emails asking for his banking information and such.

Perry’s concerned, because although you don’t have to be a senior to get scammed, Frontenac County’s on track to be more than 50 per cent seniors before too long, and seniors are a huge target.

“I found it at the car dealership,” Perry said. “I thought it would be good information for seniors.”

So, he asked Clerk Tara Mieske to see if she could get some to have in the Township office.

“We couldn’t really get hard copies for here but we can print out a couple of PDFs to put out,” she said. “And everything that’s in the book is on the website.”

So, you can get all the information at www.competitionbureau.gc.ca or call 1-800-348-5358 to find out about local scams; financial and investment scams; banking and credit card scams; spam emails and text messages; identity theft and where to report them (Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 1-888-495-8501).

Published in NORTH FRONTENAC
Wednesday, 05 February 2020 13:32

Regional Roads presentation fizzles

I hope readers will grant me this assumption – the idea of a virtual county roads system in Frontenac County, or anywhere else, is hard to understand. A real road goes somewhere, but a virtual one?

In fact, most of us never think about who owns the roads that we drive on every day. We know the difference between gravel roads and paved roads, two lane highways and four lane highways, but the fact that every road that we ride on is owned by someone rarely, if ever, crosses our minds.

For municipal politicians, however, road ownership is a big thing, and in Frontenac County it has been a major source of concern, and a major driver of tax increases, for over 20 years, ever since municipal amalgamation in 1998.

At that time, not only were the four current Frontenac townships created, but two other former Frontenac townships, Pittsburgh and Frontenac, became part of the City of Kingston. At the same time, the ownership of most of the major arterial roads in Frontenac County changed hands. The provincially owned Highway 38 became Road 38. The same thing happened to Hwy 506/509 in North and Central Frontenac.

The difference between a provincial road and a municipal road is all about who pays to maintain it. Roads 38, 509 and 506, as well the major roads on Howe and Wolfe Island, have been paid for through municipal taxes since 1998. Before then, they were paid for out of the provincial budget.

This scenario presents a problem. They are expensive roads to maintain and the area is sparsely populated. And when the roads need to be rebuilt every 25 years or so, local municipalities do not have the resources to pay for it.

Before Road 38 was downloaded, the section between the 401, and the border between South and Central Frontenac, was rebuilt by the province. The section between Central Frontenac and Highway 7, was not.

It took almost 8 years of relentless lobbying to obtain a provincial grant to rebuild Road 38 in Central Frontenac, and even then, the township had to take out a loan, and ratepayers in Central Frontenac are just now paying that loan off.

In the meantime, the section between the 401 and the Central Frontenac border is now almost 25 years old. It is by far the busiest stretch of road in Frontenac County and many, many Frontenac County residents use it every day to go to work in Kingston or Napanee or points east and west along the 401. It is the single most important piece of road infrastructure in the region and it is failing, in some spots it has already buckled.

South Frontenac is in a relatively strong financial position. Still, rebuilding Road 38 will require support from other levels of government, a large infrastructure grant to help cover a $10 million project, for the South Frontenac portion. Other key commuter roads in South Frontenac are also in need of rebuilding. Battersea Road ($6 million), Perth Road ($5 million), Sunbury road ($1.5 million) and Bedford Road ($1 million) are all listed for reconstruction within five years.

These cost estimates and the five-year time frame all come from a report by consultants KMPG, which was presented to a joint meeting of Frontenac County and the four Frontenac townships last Wednesday (January 29).

The KPMG report, which was presented by Bruce Peever, looked first at a previous study from 2013, by the Watson Group. The Watson Group concluded that financing the capital costs on a county-wide basis instead of township by township, would “smooth, and therefore minimise, future tax impacts to all county constituents,” and ultimately deliver “a better and more consistent level of service to all residents and businesses.”

The KPMG report then looked at how successful Frontenac County townships have been at obtaining road and bridge construction grants since 2014 as compared to its most immediate neighbours; Lennox and Addington, Hastings, Lanark and Leeds Grenville.

Frontenac County was in the middle of the pack for the first two years, but did very poorly between 2016 and 2018. According to the KPMG report, in 2018 alone, “Frontenac County received an average of $3 million less in grant funding than their comparator group.”

The chart that preceded that text in the report, does indeed show Frontenac County lagged far behind each of the comparators over the three year period. But the claim about receiving $3 million less in 2018 is not supported by the data. None of the comparators received $3 million in 2018, but Frontenac was about $2 million below the others.

As well, although the report only looks to the end of 2018, it was prepared in the 4th quarter of 2019, and in 2019 Central Frontenac alone received a $3 million dollar grant. Presumably then, if 2019 were included in the report, it would show a bounce back for Frontenac County.

In presenting the report, Bruce Peever pointed out that the future of granting programs under the current government is “uncertain, and it is difficult to project from the recent past into the near future as far as provincial granting programs are concerned.”

Nonetheless, the report concludes that if Frontenac County was able to apply for grants, in addition to the four Frontenac townships, the chances of success would be greater. All of the other comparators have county roads systems, that are eligible for grants, except for Hastings County, but Hastings County has fourteen local municipalities applying for grants and Frontenac County only has four. The basic logic of the argument for a virtual Frontenac County roads system is therefore that one more grant application can be sent in for every grant that is available and Frontenac would receive, over time, more in grants than otherwise.

As to how this should be set up, the KPMG report said it should be done the way Lennox and Addington does it. Local townships handle all maintenance and the county handles capital costs on county designated roads. The county has an engineer and crew on staff to handle the county roads, and the report says that Frontenac County should do the same, at a cost of $625,000 per year.

In responding to the report, North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins said “I understand the intent of all this, to get more grants, but I find the charts, and the report as a whole, confusing, and I don’t follow the conclusions.”

Frontenac Islands Mayor Dennis Doyle said “collectively we are leaving a lot of money on the table. $625,00 a year is a lot, but we spend a lot on engineering consultants and you can’t necessarily get a hold of them when you need them.”

South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal, in line with the thinking of his own council, which discussed the report at their own council meeting the previous evening, said “we feel the need to work with the existing public works departments and staff. I don’t see why we would want to create another level of bureaucracy to do this. I’d like to see a model where we do this without creating a new department.”

The whole matter has been kicked back to KPMG to prepare an implementation report, taking into account what was said at the meeting and the direction that the provincial government is headed in, to the extent that it can be determined.

But given that each of the townships will have to agree before county roads, virtual or otherwise, can be established, it is not clear that the project will move forward in 2020, just as it languished after the Watson report in 2013.

What is clear, however, is that certain major roads need to be rebuilt, and soon, and it will take grants to get rebuild them.

Would county road status make that happen more easily? No one can guarantee that.

Frontenac County chief administrative officer Kelly Pender did not say much during the presentation and the subsequent question period. He did say one thing at the very end, however.

“Every other county in Ontario has received more in infrastructure grants over the last five years than Frontenac County has. Every one.”

Published in Editorials

Last week, the Province of Ontario confirmed the annual funding for infrastructure needs, that they provide to rural Ontario municipalities, in the run up to the annual Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference.

The Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund was established under the former Liberal government in 2014 to provide funding to small, rural and northern municipalities in order to help them “build and repair critical infrastructure”.

The funding was minimal in the first couple of years, but doubled in the run-up to the 2018 provincial election. After the election, which saw the vast majority of rural ridings elect Conservative MPP’s, the program has doubled once again.

In Frontenac County, most of the money goes directly to the townships, which have responsibility for just about all of the municipal infrastructure, which is dominated by roads and bridges.

South Frontenac, which has already passed its 2020 budget based on estimates, will receive $508,412 for 2020, up from $498,738 in 2019.

Central Frontenac will receive $361,718, down from $368.076 in 2019.

North Frontenac will receive 304,907, down from 310,472

Frontenac County received $50,000, the same as last year.

In Lennox and Addington (L&A), the county level of government has more infrastructure responsibilities than the local townships. L&A will receive 761,841 this year. In 2019 they received $758,478.

Addington Highlands Township will receive $54,461 this year. In 2019, they received $55,084.

Rural municipalities also receive funding each year under the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund (OMPF) based upon a formula that looks at population as well as fiscal circumstances. OMPF is crucial to the smallest municipalities.

For 2020 Addington Highlands will receive $2,053,400 ($743 per household) the same as 2019.

Central Frontenac will receive $2,148,900 ($520 per household) about the same as last year.

North Frontenac gets $1,705,200 ($499 per household) down about $700 from last year.

South Frontenac will receive $1,553,400 ($148 per household) also about the same as 2019.

Published in General Interest

When Neil Carbone was hired as the new Chief Administrative Officer in South Frontenac last summer, it signaled that the council of the township was ready for a new future. Carbone, who is in his mid-thirties, is from a different generation than the leadership that has forged the four founding townships, that make up South Frontenac, into a single entity.

He also comes to South Frontenac from a job in Prince Edward County, where he served as the Director of Community Development and Strategic Initiatives, a role that has no parallel in Frontenac County. Prince Edward County, which is a single tier municipality, with a population of over 24,000 people, with a diverse local economy thanks to its mix of residential, agricultural and commercial sectors.

“The department underwent an expansion during my tenure. It had an Economic Development focus when I started, and by the time I left, not only had it doubled in size, but had a much broader role as well,” he said in an interview last week from his office in Sydenham. “Not only had we taken on destination tourism marketing, but also customer service and oversight of capital grants and even project management. The department’s role has become one of putting a community lens on everything that the township does.”

An example that he cited was a $4 million water and sewer replacement on the main street in Picton.

“We knew that the businesses on that street do 50% of their business in July and August, so we looked at the cost factor if we set out an RFP [Request for Proposal] that called for construction to shut down for two months in the summer. A contractor found a way to make it work for them, to do it that way, by taking some other work in the region during the summer. It cost about $200,000 more to do the project that way but it made a difference for the business community in Picton,” he said.

When he learned that South Frontenac was looking for a new Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Carbone did some research, and his interest was piqued, by the growth potential of the township and also by its financial position, so he decided to put his name forward.

“I saw a lot of opportunity in South Frontenac. The house is in order financially. It has a very lean organisation and has been building its administrative capacity, a bit pre-emptively, to handle the growth that is coming. I saw coming here as CAO as a great opportunity for me,” he said.

Coming in to 2020, the future shape of South Frontenac is coming into focus.

“I thought that our budget process was very good, very productive for my first budget, and our new strategic plan will form the basis for us to move forward quickly,” he said.

While strategic plans sometimes get lost in the shuffle, as unexpected day to day and external pressures come to bear, Carbone sees the new South Frontenac plan as a call to action, within the context of pressure from growth on the townships’ ability to maintain service levels, increase its organisational capacity and upgrade community amenities.

“When we considered those pressures in the context of increased provincial uncertainty, Council recognized the need to take control of its own destiny, a common theme of the strategic plan and the 2020 budget is a desire to lead, to grow, and to look outside our borders for opportunities to collaborate,” he wrote in a year end township press release.

The plan has four priorities: becoming a regional leader, supporting growth while protecting the environment, enhancing the township’s organizational capacity, and “being a catalyst for the creation of vibrant and complete communities”.

The idea of ‘vibrant and complete’ communities will play out when the township looks at its official plan this year. It involves making a decision to promote development that does not turn South Frontenac into a bedroom community for the City of Kingston.

“They way things are set up now, we are able to develop subdivisions with two acre lots. That limits the people that can move in to our townships and limits the business opportunities. I think the idea of communal servicing, that Joe Gallivan from Frontenac County has been leading, will be something we will talk about a lot this coming year,” he said.

Communal servicing refers to a water and sewer system, similar to a municipal system, to serve a private development. It can substantially increase the density in a development, making retail, commercial, and multi-residential development possible in rural settings where publicly owned water and sewer systems are not viable. There are technical, bureaucratic and financial liability hurdles to overcome, however.

“To realise the growth that has to be in place for complete communities in South Frontenac, let’s identify what those needs to be in place for the developer, lets talk about municipal ownership versus private ownership, let’s put the model together,” he said.

The township will also be undertaking a branding initiative this year, which fits with the strategic plan vision.

“The practise of branding itself is not just about a logo. Your brand is who you are. The act of branding a place is not about creating something new, it is about making sure that everybody sees themselves in the community,” he said.

It also ties in with an evolving role for the township, in Carbone’s view.

“We can establish one to one relations with the City of Kingston, with the Province of Ontario,” he said. “That’s part of becoming a regional leader, which is also in our strategic plan.

Published in SOUTH FRONTENAC

At first, I thought it was some kind of an almost funny joke, naming a minister of prosperity.

Why not a ministry of magic instead. We could all use some more magic in our lives, to be sure.

Aside from the awkward sound of it, there are technical questions about this ministry, the first being ‘what is the middle class?’. The new minister, Ottawa Vanier MP Mona Fortier, told the CBC that she defines the middle class as “people who feel they can afford their way of life,” people who “you know, send their kids to play hockey or even have different activities. It’s having the cost of living where you can do what you want with your families.”

This is nor very comforting to skeptic. The minister herself does not know precisely who her ministry is supposed to serve.

Minister Fortier could have captured the truth about what the idea behind her ministry really is if she said she was the “minister of more money for most people” with most people is defined as everyone except the very rich and the poor.

The closest thing to a definition of the middle class that I have found, in an admittedly limited search, is based on dividing income into five brackets of 20% increments, and defining the middle class as those who fall in the middle three brackets.

By that definition, you still have to look at it all in terms of regions, because the cost of living varies by geography, and there is an urban/rural divide as well. Then there is the difference between ‘income of families’ and ‘income of unattached individuals’ to use Stats Can catchphrases. An individual making $45,000 might make the grade, a family, not so much. On the high end, a family making over $150,000 in some parts of the country would be upper instead of middle, but in some parts a family needs to hit the $200,000 mark to slip into the upper crust.

Essentially, the Trudeau government seems to think of the ‘middle class’ as a self-defining group, and apparently 70% of Canadians (68% of Ontarians) consider themselves to be part of the middle class. Some of those people might fit the statistical definition of the middle class, and some don’t. The ministry is therefore really about signalling to 70% of the population that the government is so concerned about their ‘prosperity’ that it is willing to spend their money setting up an office devoted to it, with staff, furniture and computers/cellphones etc. Middle class prosperity is so important, in fact, that it even warrants a minister and a limousine (with driver).

To be fair to the Trudeau government, just for a minute, during their first mandate they identified the reduction of poverty as a long-term goal, and Stats Can has developed data on poverty rates. And those rates have dropped in recent years.

As part of that effort, statistical work has been done to identify the poverty line in a systematic way across the country. It is based on how much it costs for food, housing, transportation, etc, and it is the line minimum that a family or an individual would need to comfortably cover all those costs.

According to Stats Canada, 9.5% of Canadian families were living under the poverty line in 2017, the latest year for which figures are available. The income level that defines poverty is based on 2015 incomes, so it would be up to 10% higher now, and it also varies from region to region. The national average for the poverty line, was $37,542 in 2015 dollars for a family of 4, half of that for individuals living on their own. With four years of inflation factored in, it is about $40,000 for a family or 4 in 2019, and $20,000 for an individual. In Frontenac County, where costs are lower than the national average, it might be a bit lower than that.

There has to be a gap between the poverty line and the middle-class line. Families earning $60,000 per year or less, and individuals making $30,000 or less, are by no means middle class in Canada in 2019. These families still drive their kids to hockey, but the money they spend on hockey hurts them, making it difficult to avoid debt. This group, up to a quarter of the families in the country, are those who are one or two setbacks away from slipping towards or over the poverty line. A cut in income, a layoff or an illness that would be manageable for those with a true middle-class income, can be devastating to this population.

This population will benefit from the cuts in income tax rates that have been announced, but only marginally because they are already paying less income tax than those with much higher incomes. Meanwhile, inevitable increases in the price of fuel, food, housing, and municipal taxes all hit this group much harder than those with higher incomes.

As the government devotes their attention to helping those who are doing well to do better, can they not spare a thought for those of us who are struggling to sustain what we have. All of the parties, even the NDP, love the middle class.

It would be really magical if they showed some love for the rest of us as well.

Published in Editorials

At their meeting last Friday, North Frontenac Council passed a motion to explore 2 previously discussed options for the development of a regional roads network in Frontenac County.

The main stated purpose of the regional roads network is to make Frontenac County, as well as its member municipalities, eligible for road construction grants. For the past 20 years, only the municipalities have been able to apply for federal and provincial road and bridge grants.

A study prepared by Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender, estimated that under the granting programs that have been in place, Frontenac County lost out on “$3M to $5.3M dollars higher over a three-year period” between 2015 and 2017.

In response to this, Pender proposed, in a report to Frontenac County Council in April, that each of the Frontenac townships endorse one of two similar versions of a plan that would see the county play a minor or no role at all in planning road construction on the major roads in the county, but establish enough responsibility to be able to apply for grants, which would save each of the townships and/or lead to a higher level of road maintenance.

A motion, passed by Frontenac County Council on April 17, asked each of the townships to pass a motion endorsing a version of the plan by May 31st.

North Frontenac did not do so in time, opting instead to wait for a legal opinion about a clause in the plan that calls for 1% ownership of arterial roads in each of the townships. Once that opinion was delivered, and said the 1% ownership will not create a legal issue. Still North Frontenac wanted the public works managers from the townships to discuss the proposals before bringing them back to North Frontenac Council for a vote.

The public works managers met on July 17th and recommended that one of the options be explored further through the development of a business plan at a cost of $40,000 to be funded by Frontenac County, using one-time grant monies from the Province of Ontario that are supposed to aid rural municipalities to become more efficient in their operations.

The motion that North Frontenac Council passed last week called for the development of the business plan by a consultant, but also asked that the consultant examine changes that are taking place in new funding models from both the federal and provincial governments.

The North Frontenac motion also specifically precludes a key piece of the county proposal, which is a call for the county to petition the province to remove clause 6.2 from the restructuring order of 1997 which created the current form of Frontenac County governance. Clause 6.2 prohibits Frontenac County from being involved in roads, and downloads all road issues and ownership to the local townships.

“Council does not endorse a petition to the Province of Ontario to remove section 6.2 … related to the prohibition of county involvement in roads …”

A report by North Frontenac Public Works Manager, Darwyn Sproule, brought two concerns with the county plan to the forefront.

One concern is that the funding program under which the county would have been able to receive grant monies, which it has been missing out on, has been discontinued and the details about the program that is replacing it are “unknown at this time”, according to Sproule.

The second concern is based on a string of successful grant applications that North Frontenac has received in recent years, up to and including a grant in 2019 of $1.5 million to go towards improvements to the Myers Cave/Harlowe Road. This comes on the heels of over $2.8 million in grants received by the township since 2014.

“With the current regional roads proposal, there doesn’t appear to be a downside to the county when grant applications are unsuccessful, but the ability for the townships to apply individually may be impacted,” Sproule wrote.

North Frontenac Council followed Sproules’ recommendation.

Councillor John Inglis, who spent eight years on Frontenac County Council between 2010 and 2017, said that the regional roads plan was brought forward in his first year at the county.

“It was a no-brainer then, it meant more money for roads. Now I see the funding formula has changed and I have a bias against it now. It now means ‘same roads, more staff.’”

  

Published in NORTH FRONTENAC

The South Frontenac Planning Department receives a steady stream of inquiries from individuals and developers who are looking to do business in South Frontenac.

Given the nature of land use planning, especially in a rural area where each piece of property brings unique challenges with it, some of these inquiries go nowhere, and others can seem like a rabbit hole, leading to a years’ long, expensive, detailed process that is sometimes mired in controversy and often results in delays and added costs.

The township has ramped up its planning department to deal with the influx of complex applications, and developed a closer working relationship with Frontenac Count’s planning department, since applications for plans of subdivision and plans of land use condominium, which are the most complex and quite often controversial planning applications, are subject to approval by Frontenac County.

On top of everything, the fact that much of the demand in the marketplace is for year-round homes on water within a short drive from the city of Kingston, pitting development pressures against environmental concerns in many cases.

And now the building permits sales data is starting to indicate that the planning boom in South Frontenac may be resulting in an increase in construction activity. For a number of years, permit sales have hovered around the $30 million mark annually in the township.

The second quarter (April to June) is the busiest each year, but this year it was the busiest quarter in at least 4 years. The construction value was $14.8 million over the 90 day period, $1.8 million more than last year, $2 million more than the same period in 2017, and $3 million more than 2016. The total is about the same, in one quarter, as the three other Frontenac Township combined permit values for most years.

And it is new construction of single-family dwellings that is the main driver of the construction boom in the township. Permits for 39 new homes were issued in the 2nd quarter of this year, an increase over 26 in 2018 and 32 in the 2nd quarter of 2017.

If the pattern from previous years holds, more new home permits will be sold in the second half of the year than in the first half and the total for 2019 could very well reach 85 to 90, well up from 66 in 2018, and 71 in each of 2017 and 2016.

It all sets up a pretty interesting context for the township to be conducting both a Strategic and an Official Review just as the Chief Administrative Officer, Neil Carbone, assumes his role. There is a short survey posted on the township website for the Strategic Plan, and public meetings are set for Sunbury, Sydenham and Verona this month, all aimed at creating a document that may be referred to by council and staff if they are seeking direction when making decisions over the next few years. But while a strategic plan may, at best, reflect the intentions of the council and residents of the township and one or two over-arching goals, it has not real teeth.

The Official Plan, however, can create new opportunities for residents and developers alike, and can close off opportunities as well, all within the confines of a set of provincially mandated standards as expressed in the provincial policy statement and codified in the provincial planning act.

Claire Dodds, the Director of Development Services for South Frontenac, outlined a process for updating the township Official in a presentation to a Public Meeting as part of the August meeting of Council on Tuesday night.

As she worked through the process in her report, she made reference to an issue that defines an area of tension both within the township and between the township and the planning policy directives coming from the Province of Ontario.

Under the heading of growth management, one of the bullets in the report says: “Province permits limited growth in rural areas and direct majority of growth to settlement areas”.

While this logic makes sense as a general rule, it does not easily fit the reality in Frontenac County. For one thing, the demand is greater for lots in the countryside, and particularly near water, than within the hamlets. Secondly, among the hamlets only Sydenham has a municipal water system and none of the hamlets have a municipal sewage system, more density in hamlet is not necessarily advisable since that involves crowding septic systems together as well as stressing the water table.

As part of its Official Plan review, South Frontenac may look at changing the boundaries of its hamlets to create more opportunities, and it may also look at the possibility of creating smaller scale, privately held water and sewer systems within individual developments. This is something that the Frontenac County Development department has been looking, and in Claire Dodds report to council she refers to proposes changes in provincial policy that might create “flexibility by clarifying perceived barriers to sewage and water treatment policies in rural settlement areas.

There is another factor that will certainly become apparent as the Official Plan process gets underway in South Frontenac. There are a significant number of people in any rural township, and certainly in one experience growth pressure such as South Frontenac is facing, who will see only a downside to significant growth.

Rural landowners do not necessarily want to live too close to their neighbours, in fact they often don’t want to see their neighbours at all. And just about every proposal for a waterfront development will be opposed by neighbours on the lake, for good environmental reasons and for self interested reasons as well.

These are just some of the tensions that will be expressed through the Official Plan process in the township.

Managing growth, creating business opportunities in the retail sector, and creating employment through growth, will be major factors throughout this process, which is projected to take over 2 years to complete.

While only a small percentage of residents will take an interest in the Official Plan, those that do will be taking a keen, active interest, and many who don’t will still find, eventually, that the plan that emerges from this effort will one day have an impact on their living situation or their financial situation.

Published in Editorials
Wednesday, 10 July 2019 13:46

It’s time for us re-jig Frontenac County

All has been quiet on the Queen’s Park front in recent weeks, at least as far as creating a new template for municipal governance in the province is concerned. A review of how regional governance is working in municipalities across southern Ontario is ongoing and that may lead to some changes. As to what the provincial government is planning for Eastern and Northern Ontario, particularly for small, rural municipalities, is not the least bit clear.

There have been hints, however. Changes in administration are still being planned for services such as Public Health, Paramedic Services, Libraries, and Child Care, which are all overseen by municipalities and partially funded with municipal dollars. And there is a clear direction from the government, they want to see larger and larger entities covering larger swathes of territory.

In March, there was one-time funding allotment for small, rural municipalities in the spring. It came with no strings attached but was earmarked to be used to find efficiencies in the delivery of municipal services, with no indication about what those inefficiencies might be. There is every reason to believe that rural municipalities will be the next sector that will be addressed, and the push for larger entities is the likely outcome.

The time frame during which such changes are likely to be initiated is now pretty narrow. If it is going happen before the next provincial election, we will likely know something about it before the end of the year, if not earlier.

In the context of change, there is another question that should be asked, at least in Frontenac County, and that is whether we are well served by the municipal arrangements that are currently in place.

When the current system was established in 1998, responsibility for the delivery of municipal services was split between the Frontenac Townships (roads and bridges, building and development, recreation, finance, waste, etc) and the City of Kingston (social services: child care, Ontario Works, Housing, etc) with ancillary institutions such as KFL&A Public Health, the Kingston Frontenac Public Library and others operating at arms length by boards appointed by the municipalities. The Frontenac Management Board (FMB), overseen by the four Frontenac Mayors, was set up in order to facilitate all of the relationships between the townships, the City of Kingston, and those boards. It also operated a long-term care facility, Fairmount Home, and later won the contract to provide Paramedic Services in Kingston and Frontenac.

The FMB then renamed itself Frontenac County and has taken on some of the land use planning and IT functions for the Frontenac Townships, and has established a small economic development department.

The fact that our municipalities do not deal in any direct way with services aimed at alleviating poverty, at keeping people housed and healthy, and supporting our aging population, makes us something less than a full-blown municipality.

We have been lucky enough in Frontenac County to have two community-based agencies, Rural Frontenac Community Services and Southern Frontenac Community Services, providing the kinds of supports that people rely upon, but each of these agencies is facing constraints from an increasingly fickle provincial government. In place of the moral support and minimal funding they receive from the municipalities they serve, a true partnership needs to emerge to ensure they can provide the kinds of services that we decide are necessary, instead of the services that the provincial government decides to fund.

In order to comply with the Policing Act, Frontenac County requires a Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. The Frontenac Townships are working together on this, and are setting up an advisory committee to develop the plan. This exercise could result in an empty shell of a plan, or one that starts to expand the scope of our municipal services.

Perhaps the Province of Ontario will decide how our municipal future will unfold, perhaps not.

But it is high time that we begin a conversation about developing a comprehensive political structure devoted to the needs of all Frontenac County residents. In my view, a single Frontenac Township is necessary to take on the needs of the 28,000 permanent residents and almost as many seasonal residents. By pooling all of our physical, administrative, and human resources, we can begin to serve the particular needs of our residents. If the opportunity arises, we would be in a position to make a case to the provincial government for the establishment of such a political body.

The status quo is not a solution any more, and if we do not make an effort to build our own future, based on our shared history and the land that we occupy, or someone from the outside is certain to do it for us.

 

Published in Editorials
Wednesday, 29 May 2019 13:47

1% stake? Not so fast says CF

Central Frontenac Township deferred making a commitment on regional roads at its regular meeting Tuesday evening in Mountain Grove until it hears back from lawyer Tony Fleming as to what a “1 per cent ownership of regional roads and bridges” means in a proposal drafted up by Frontenac County and presented to the four member townships for ratification.

In a report to Central Frontenac Council, Dep. Clerk Cindy Deachman said: “staff have some reservations about the 1 per cent ownership model and how it would integrate with the jurisdiction sections of the Municipal Act.

Frontenac County currently owns no roads and/or bridges as part of the restructuring order at amalgamation. As such, it is not eligible for some grant money to be applied to roads such as 38 or 509/506. What the townships are concerned about is how much say the County would have in road repairs and how much of any grant money the County would administer.

For example, would a County staff member be the one to decide if a pothole on Road 38 got fixed? Or would the County have the right to hire staff to make such decisions?

North Frontenac Township passed a similar resolution at its meeting Monday in Plevna, wanting to know the same things Central does before making a decision on which of several proposals the County has made to support, if any.

South Frontenac has already endorsed a proposal that grants Frontenac County a 1 per cent ownership interest in agreed-upon regional roads and proposes contracting out for any engineering services required to apply for and/or administer grants.

Mayor Frances Smith said she was concerned that by deferring, they may miss out on some funding.

Hydro for Railway Heritage Park

Central Frontenac Council gave its consent to the Central Frontenac Railway Heritage Society to have Hydro One install a pole at Railway Heritage Park in order to get power to the tool shed and for things like security cameras and amplifiers/PA for concerts and other events.

Co-chair Gary Giller and Treasurer Wayne Moase told Council that they had the funds to have the services installed but asked for help with the monthly hydro fees.

They also asked if they could be put under the Township’s insurance for liability and damage to assets.

When Dep. Mayor Victor Heese wondered if the Society should become a Committee of Council to accommodate these requests, Mayor Frances Smith pointed out that if they ceased to be a private society, their opportunities for grants would become severely limited.

Council agreed to have staff look into the insurance aspects and also to examine a ‘donation’ to pay hydro and/or insurance as if has done with other groups in the Township.

RKY Hall

Mayor Frances Smith said that RKY Camp on Eagle Lake is building a 150-seat banquet hall that should be finished by 2020 at the latest.

“This will be an asset to the Township to be able to seat 150 people for dinner,” she said. “It could attract a lot of convention type business.”

Swiss Smith

On becoming a Swiss TV star (ie appearing in the Swiss TV show featuring two Frontenac paramedics switching places with two Swiss paramedics), Mayor Frances Smith seemed somewhat underwhelmed.

“Something that takes 20 minutes ended up taking two hours because we had to do it three times,” she said. “I guess that’s television.”

Published in FRONTENAC COUNTY
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