North Frontenac Council - Sep 27/11

Jeff Green | Sep 29, 2011

Neighbouring counties and Denbigh ambulance

The Denbigh ambulance base, whose fate will be decided by Lennox and Addington County Council as early as the end of October, came to the fore at a meeting of North Frontenac Council this week.

Paul Isaacs, from the Denbigh Ambulance Network, submitted a copy of the presentation he had made at Lennox and Addington County two weeks earlier. His presentation attacked the consultant’s report by the IBI group of Toronto, saying the report, which recommends closing the Denbigh base and replacing it with a base in Loyalist Township, is full of “egregious” errors.

Accompanying Paul Isaacs was Peter Emon, the mayor of the Township of Greater Madawaska, who travelled to the meeting in Snow Road from his home in Calabogie. Emon also attended the L&A County meeting in Napanee on September 14, and a meeting of the Denbigh ambulance network on September 22.

“The Denbigh ambulance is important for our area, your area as well. If there is a single ambulance based at Northbrook, it is still going to be pulled away to Kaladar for backup, or could get called out, leaving North Frontenac and Madawaska Highlands without any service,” Emon said, “so this of interest to our ambulance service in Renfrew. Lennox and Addington made a slight shift in suggesting for the first time at their meeting in Napanee that Denbigh is a regional ambulance. That might be significant. It might be suggested that you look at your own Frontenac service in light of all this.”

“It might be a bit of an uphill battle,” said John Inglis, a North Frontenac representative to Frontenac County Council. “Our land ambulance coordinator suggested that closing Denbigh would improve response times in North Frontenac as the new Northbrook base is located closer to Cloyne.”

“At this Council table, you are preaching to the converted,” said North Frontenac Mayor Bud Clayton, “we all recognize the importance of the Denbigh base, but that does not mean, as John said, that we speak for Frontenac County.”

At the September 22 Denbigh Ambulance Network meeting, Emon said that he had talked to both the warden and chief administrative officer of Renfrew County, and they were both receptive to the idea of Renfrew County making a financial commitment investment, with certain guarantees, towards maintaining the Denbigh base. The estimated annual cost of running a 24-hour service is $1 million. The province of Ontario pays about half that operating cost, leaving $500,000 for L&A ratepayers to cover.

“There are three other counties that are served by the Denbigh base, Frontenac, Renfrew and Hastings… That would mean a commitment of $125,000 a year for a shared service. In Renfrew County our ambulance costs are $5.5 million a year, so $125,000 is something we might consider,” Emon said at the Denbigh meeting.

The idea of sharing costs did not come up at the North Frontenac Council meeting.

Arcol Road bridges to be rebuilt: Two bridges on the Arcol Road, a crown land road leading to Granite, Hungry, Mair and Govan Lakes, have been declared unsafe by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR). The replacement cost is about $128,000.The MNR is willing to kick in $103,000 and the township has secured a $15,000 commitment from the Eastern Ontario Tourist Association, using grant money the have received from the province. The net cost to the township is about $10,000, but there is a rush to move on the project. For one thing, moose hunting starts on October 17, and secondly, with a provincial election underway, there is a sense that it might not be wise to wait until after October 6 before getting started.

Council approved a proposal to go ahead with the project as soon as possible, and will proceed by seeking verbal quotes from local contractors to complete the work.