Lanark County recently brought in an expert on how to fight flooding with organized forces of trained volunteers. Technical tricks for fighting the floodwaters once they have threatened your home. That is too late. We need to understand that floodwaters are rain and snowmelt that has run off the land too quickly. Flooding happens because the water was not kept on the land long enough. To fight the increasingly common severe storms and unpredictable melting, we need to understand that floodwaters come from the whole area that drains into a river or creek. We call that area the watershed and the conditions on the watershed control what happens downstream. The condition of the watershed is the root cause of the flooding of your home. If…

I commend you for your initiative in reaching out to your ardent readers. My wife is a HUGE supporter of yours and is giving the equivalent of the cost of a subscription. I hope you can also make your seasonal readers aware of your initiative in the spring. We come to our second home most weekends through the winter, and are not seasonal residents, so we get to read The Frontenac News all year round. I trust Canada Post doesn’t consider your newspaper a flyer because we’re about to ask them not to put flyers in our postal box because they stop putting your newspaper in the box if it gets full after a couple of weeks.Which leads me to the thought that by becoming…

I am writing as Chair of the Food Policy Council for Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox & Addington, an independent body consisting of a diverse group of people who live or work in KFL&A area. The Council’s mandate is to work towards the KFL&A's Food Charter's purpose of creating a secure and sustainable food system for our region. We believe that in order to best way to ensure food security for all in KFL&A we must build a system in which everyone has the money they need to be able to access healthy food. To that end, we support the new minimum wage legislation in Ontario, as well as other reforms to workplace legislation. I am attaching the letter we wrote to the provincial Standing Committee on…

To my mind the fundamental block in follow through on the septic re-inspection issue has been the "us vs them" mentality. Either it was one neighbour pointing at another; land-access cottagers vs Island residents; village residents vs lakefront; seasonal vs permanent; or most recently, rich vs poor. The report of the Septic Re-inspection Committee tried to steer the issue away from a pursuit of allegedly delinquent property owners, to a focus upon information-gathering. The Committee members learned that the failure rate in septic systems is typically very low; cooperation in reporting systems is usually very high; and the environmental impact of poorly operating septic systems is negligible in any event when compared to the impact of run-off in extreme weather situations.  Accurate information on septic…

A welcome challenge "outside the box" I came back from Newfoundland in October to find that exciting things have been happening here over the past few months. Thank you for your coverage so far on the "Contribute and Thrive" bundle of projects that North Frontenac Council has been discussing. While I maintain what I trust is common-sense skepticism about some of the ideas, I also applaud the "C&T North Frontenac" group, and Mayor Higgins, for their openness and willingness to think "outside the box." After several decades of experience with various collective attempts to forge different and better ways of living, I realize that many such attempts fail. But some succeed, and there is never success without some failures along the way. Moreover, it's high…