Members of Kingston City Council were disappointed last week when Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender did not show up to brief them on how much the city will be charged for the delivery of land ambulance service and Fairmount Home in 2020.

Both services are operated by Frontenac County, with funding support from the Province of Ontario, City of Kingston ratepayers and Frontenac County ratepayers.

At a budget meeting on November 26, city council member Wayne Hill is quoted in the Whig Standard article as saying “I don’t understand why they are not here tonight. It seems to me they don’t want to answer these questions in front of Council. It leaves us really blind.”

When contacted this week from his office at Frontenac County headquarters in Glenburnie, Pender said the real question in the matter is not whether he attended or not, but why his name was on the agenda in the first place.

“When we met with the mayor and other city officials at RULAC [Rural Urban Liaison Committee] on October 30th, I told them that I could give them a number for each of the services in 2020, but it would almost certainly be wrong. We won’t know until we find out how much the province is paying into those budgets next year, and we don’t know when they are going to tell us.”

Pender said that, even after informing the city that the budget numbers are not available, in early November he received an invitation to the November 26 city budget meeting.

“I informed them that I would not be attending the November 26 meeting, for reasons that I made clear to them once again. Apparently my name was not removed from the agenda and Council still expected someone to be there from Frontenac County.”

When Frontenac County Council met in October to work on their own 2020 budget, the amount paid by the province in 2019 to support Frontenac Paramedic Services (land ambulance) and Fairmount Home was plugged into the budget. Pender told his council the same thing he told City of Kingston officials, that the number was certainly wrong for 2020.

Pender said this week that he does not expect to have final numbers in time for the Frontenac County Council meeting on December 18, and Frontenac County will likely go into 2020 without an approved budget.

“The provincial numbers may not be available until provincial budget time in March,” Pender said over the phone on Tuesday (December 3).

“At some point we will need to approve our budget in order to set a tax rate for our member municipalities to plug in to their tax bills. But it won’t be on December 18.”

He added that once the province tells Frontenac County how much they will be contributing for 2020, he will bring that information to Frontenac County Council. Once Frontenac County Council finalises the budgets for Frontenac Paramedic Services and Fairmount Home, that information will be provided to the City of Kingston.

The City of Kingston has requested that all third-party agencies that they fund, keep any increases to 2.5%, the same request that they made in 2019.

In 2019, the bill to Kingston for Frontenac Paramedic Services was up by 7.7% over 2018 and the bill for Fairmount Home was up by 5.2%.

City staff managed to find money in reserves to cover most of the increase, which was not accounted for in the 2019 Kingston budget, but at a Kingston City Council meeting in September, the decision was taken to withhold the last $200,000 from amount levied to the city by Frontenac County for the services.

Frontenac County has not backed down, and the matter of the $200,000 payment is now the subject of mediation.

Under a separate agreement, the City of Kingston provides children’s services, Ontario Works and social housing services for Frontenac County, and levies funds to Frontenac County ratepayers to cover a portion of those costs. For 2020, the levy for children’s services and Ontario Works is up, by 6.6%, while the social housing levy is down, by 4.4%.

Frontenac County senior administration began talking about the need for an improved administrative office suite several years ago. This has lead to the consideration of a number of options, the completion of a number of studies and a consultation process led by Rob Wood of 80/20Info.

An Administrative Building Design Taskforce was formed in 2016 and has met in fits and starts ever since. Between last summer and the spring of this year, the task force was looking at the idea of constructing a new building, located in South Frontenac, to house the administrations of South Frontenac Township, the Cararaqui Region Conservation Authority (CRCA), as well as Frontenac County.

But in April, South Frontenac informed the county that they were not proceeding with any relocation plans at this point, and will remain based at the township hall complex in Sydenham in addition to a supplementary office at the Keeley Road works yard just outside of Sydenham for the foreseeable future.

Three months later, the design task force met again, and this time considered a new proposal that is based on remaining in place at the existing “Old House” building that is co-located with the County owned Fairmount Home site. A new facility analysis has been prepared by architects Coulbourn and Kendell of Kingston, presenting two options, a renovated space for Frontenac County alone and a renovated space for Frontenac County and the CRCA. In both cases, the working assumption is that headquarters of Frontenac Paramedic Service will no longer be located in the building.

During the July 17 meeting of the Administrative Building Design Taskforce, Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender referred to the uncertainty about how paramedic services will be administered in Ontario after 2019. The Province of Ontario plans to reduce the number of paramedic service operators in Ontario from 56 to 10 within a year.

“We don’t know what will happen with Paramedic Services. If FPS goes away they will not need the space anymore, and if the service stays with us we will move it to a location in the City of Kingston,” he said.

Option 1 in the Coulbourn and Kendell facility analysis includes just under $1 million for renovations to make the existing building, which is still set up more like stately home than an office space, as well as a $452,000, fifteen hundred square foot extension at the east end of the building to create a new council chamber from an external entrance. The estimated total cost of option 1 is $1.84 million, $2.21 million if construction is done to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, which has been Frontenac Counties practice

Under this scenario the suite of offices on the lower level of the building, currently occupied by Frontenac Paramedic Services, will be available for lease once they are vacated.

Option 2 is based on the assumption that the CRCA will occupy the FPS offices, which will require a 6,300 square foot addition to the building to the south in order to be large enough for their needs. The new council chamber would be be a shared space with the CRCA. The estimated cost of construction would be $3.7 million ($4.4 million if it is LEED certified) but the CRCA would pay a substantial occupancy cost, rendering option 2 the one that would most likely lead to lower costs for Frontenac County ratepayers.

The CRCA Board will make a determination shortly about their involvement in the project, but all along CAO Pender has indicated that the administrative needs for the CRCA are more acute than those of Frontenac County, because, he said, their current building it at the end of its useful life.

The task force passed a motion to proceed to the next stage of the project under option a or b, pending a decision about participation from the CRCA. The next phase would be to compete a detailed study of the space needs of both organisations to come up with a final floor plan, at which time the actual costs can be determined. The task force will reconvene at the call of the chair, likely in September or October.

The next phase in what might be called a little misunderstanding between municipal partners, will play out at a city council meeting in Kingston in September.

According to a city official, when Frontenac County Officials brought budget numbers that included a 14.4% increase in the municipal levy for Frontenac Paramedic Services (FPS), and an 8.7% increase in the levy for Fairmount Home, the city council did not accept those numbers and inserted a 5% increase into the City budget that they subsequently approved.

Later, when Frontenac County approved its own budget, with the 14.4% and 8.7% increases in tact, it created a shortfall in the Kingston budget. In a committee meeting attended by Kingston and Frontenac County politicians that was held on June 26, the City’s position was that it was willing to use reserve funds to pay for a 7.7% increase in the levy for FPS and a 6.9% increase in the Fairmount Home levy, but asked the county to cover the rest. This would require the County of Frontenac to revisit its 2019 budget.

A motion to re-open the 2019 budget was forwarded from the committee to the July Frontenac County Council meeting. The motion never got on the floor because none of the Frontenac County Council members saw fit to second it.

The matter will now go to Kingston City Council.

Amber Bryant-Peller, special assistant to Mayor Bryan Paterson, said that City Council will consider the budgetary implications of the Frontenac County decision to stick with the 14.4% and 8.7% increases when they meet in September.

When asked if the council will be considering seeking arbitration or perhaps a court remedy in the matter, she deferred.

“All I am saying is that they will consider the implications of increases that fall outside of the projections that were used to prepare the City budget” she said, after conferring with Mayor Paterson.

She said that Mayor Paterson had not indicated what action he will recommend that city council take in light of the county’s decision to stick with the increases.

In the minutes to the June 26 meeting, however, there is an indication of Mayor Paterson’s intent.

“In the absence of reconsideration by the county, the mayor indicated the city is prepared to go to court if the levy to the city is not reduced” the minutes say.

The county’s position, as stated by Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender, again from the June 26 meeting’s minutes, is that the funding arrangements for both services can indeed be taken to arbitration.

“However, the arbitrator only has jurisdiction over the apportionment formula aspect of the agreement,” said Pender.

After a long gap, the Rural-Urban Liaison Committee (RULAC), a forum where members of Frontenac County and Kingston City Council have an opportunity to discuss issues related to their shared responsibilities, met on June 26.

The meeting was initiated by Frontenac County Warden Ron Higgins, after he had some conversations with Kingston Mayor Brian Patterson over the winter and spring. During those conversations, Patterson revealed that the city was unhappy about cost increases at the county owned Fairmount Home and the county run Frontenac Paramedic Services (FPS).

Both services have both a provincial, and a municipal funding component. The municipal funding responsibility is shared by the city and the county using a formula that is based on assessed property values within the two jurisdictions.

While Frontenac County Council decides on the budgets for FPS and Fairmount, the bulk of the municipal costs for them are paid out of City of Kingston coffers. This rarely leads to much consternation at city council so long as the levy to the city for Fairmount and FPS does not go up too much from year to year.

However, in December of 2018, representatives from Frontenac County came to a City of Kingston budget meeting with numbers that did not go down that well, an increase of 14.4% for Fairmount Home and 8.4% for Frontenac Paramedic Services.

While both the city and the county have long since passed their 2019 budgets, the city is asking Frontenac County to make some retroactive changes.

According to the minutes from the June 26 RULAC meeting, Kingston City Council is willing to cover their share of costs for a 7.7% increase for FPs and a 6.9% increase for Fairmount Home, and they want Frontenac County to cover the rest.

County officials pointed out that if the county went back and funded the difference by dipping into county reserve funds, it would only lead to an even greater upward pressure on the 2020 budget. County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender and Treasurer Susan Brant both indicated they would not recommend that County Council open up the already approved 2019 budget to increase the county share of costs for Fairmount and FPS.

Pender acknowledged that the city could bring the matter to arbitration and even to court, but only the apportionment formula in the funding agreements is open to a court challenge, not the actual funding amounts.

According to the minutes from the meeting, Mayor Patterson indicated at the end of the exchange that the “city is prepared to go to court if the levy to the city is not reduced”.

A motion was forwarded from the RULAC meeting to Frontenac County Council to the effect that the “County of Frontenac reopen the 2019 budget for Frontenac Paramedic Service and Fairmount Home for budget levy.”

When contacted early this week, Frontenac County Warden Ron Higgins said that he does not expect Frontenac County Council will support this motion at its monthly meeting, which takes place this week, nor does he expect that any court action that the city decides to take will have any success.

“I had a look at the Municipal Act and it is pretty clear. I don’t see where they can really go with this,” he said.

He added that he believes that the friction between the county and the city can be resolved.

“I think this all came about because of a lack of communication. When we presented those budgets to Kingston City Council we were granted only ten minutes to explain the two budgets needed to increased, not enough time to explain, for example, that because of call volumes in the city a new shift was being implemented by FPS to serve Kingston and that was the main reason for the increase,” he said.

Higgins added that the root of the problem is that RULAC has not been meeting and the relationship between the county and the city has deteriorated as a result.

“I did not know what RULAC was all about. I think it only met once in my first term on council. My suggestion is that we meet more regularly so we can avoid any potential conflicts.”

This pending dispute over the 20-year-old funding models is taking place in the context of a climate of uncertainty, both in funding and governance, for both long term care and paramedic services.

The provincial government has stated its intention to change the delivery model for paramedic services radically within the next year, by merging paramedic service operators. There are currently 50 in Ontario and they intend to reduce that to 10. Under this scenario, it is highly likely that FPS will no longer exist in its current form.

Long Term Care Facilities, such as Fairmount Home, operate under a license and a provincial funding formula that is administered by Local Health Integration Networks, which are being eliminated as part of wide-ranging health care reform.

“Get out and do things with little ones,” said United Way representative Kim Hockey last Thursday at the South Frontenac garage on Keeley Road. “You don’t have to save for a trip to Disneyland every day.

“Take the time and make the moment matter.”

“It might even kick start a career,” said Tim Hockey.

The event, Touch the Truck, is part of the United Way’s Success By Six program and features trucks and equipment assembled together from South Frontenac Township, Frontenac OPP, South Frontenac Fire & Rescue and Frontenac Paramedic Services. The idea is for parents and grandparents to bring their little ones out to climb into cabs, and see just what all these big vehicles do.

It’s also family time in disguise.

“It shows the importance of early years,” Dickey said. “United Way has more than 120 activities throughout KFL&A but you don’t necessarily have to have an organized event for people to spend time together.

“It could be just having dinner together, reading a story or taking a walk.”

But this was an event and one that accomplished more than one goal. Getting together as families and a community is one of them, but it’s also a chance to let people see and hear about the various organizations at work in that community.

“Each of these organizations and vehicles play a huge role in our day to day lives,” said South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal. “The support they provide to our community each and every day is outstanding.”

And it’s fun. That was plain to see on the faces of the kids, parents, grandparents and even on the firefighters, police officers and Township workers demonstrating equipment and explaining how it works.

In other words, the organization workers seemed to be having as much fun as the people who came out to see their gear.

Paramedic Lyanne Dickie had a huge smile on her face as she showed kids where things are stored in her ambulance.

“This is my first event of this type,” she said. “I’m really enjoying it.

“There are a lot more kids than I expected and the energy is vibrating off them.”

Gale Chevalier will take over as Chief of Frontenac Paramedics on July 1st.

She shouldn’t have any difficulty fitting in, however, since she will be heading a service where she has spent her entire 25-year career as a paramedic.

She began working as a Primary Care Paramedic at Hotel Dieu Hospital Regional EMS in Kingston in 1994 and progressed to Advanced Care Paramedic in 1997. In 2004, after the Frontenac Paramedic Services took over the Hotel Dieu operation, she became the Operations Supervisor with the new service, and advanced to Supervisor of Quality Assurance and Training in 2009. She became the Deputy Chief of Performance Standards since November 2010 and Deputy Chief of Operations in April last year.

She also serves as the Acting Chief while Chief Paul Charbonneau was off on a leave of absence in late 2018 and early 2019. In February, Charbonneau returned from leave and announced his intention to retire, and the job was posted widely.

According to a Frontenac county media release, Chevalier “was the unanimous selection of the recruitment panel in a highly competitive field of candidates.”

With his replacement named, Paul Charbonneau is set to retire on July 1.

“I’m very excited and honoured to become the next Chief at Frontenac Paramedics, and I’m looking forward to leading a great team of professionals, and an organisation where I’ve spent my entire career,” said Chevalier. “I want to make sure we remain an employer of choice and continue to be leaders in the industry.”

The announcement of her appointment came one day after the news came out that the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for Ontario intends the reduce the number of ambulance services in the province from 59 to just 10.

The potential impacts of the changes that the ministry is planning were not lost on her when she very briefly addressed Frontenac Council on Wednesday afternoon.

“It is an interesting time to take this on,” she said with a bit of wry smile when introduced to Council as the next chief, “but we will continue to provide the best service we can and we’ll see what changes come about.”

Out-going Chief Charbonneau reported to Council about what he had learned in the roughly 36 preceding hours since he found out about the Ministry’s unexpected plans.

“They said they will be consulting with the Paramedic Service providers, but it will be a quick turnaround for consultation, maybe a week or two, then we expect they will set up some sort of request for proposal process, similar to what they have done in other parts of the health care system,” he said.

“We have always been pro-active at Frontenac Paramedic Services, when it came to community Paramedicine or to addressing mental health issues among Paramedics, and we intend to be pro-active in this case.”

Charbonneau also said that when it was announced in the provincial budget that dispatch services were going to be rationalised into 10 dispatch centres it was widely applauded by Chiefs of Paramedic Services across the Province as a way to improve service.

“That was something the we had been asking for, but we never talked to them about cutting the number of providers. For our service, … It’s one of those cases where we need to decide if we want to drive the bus, be on the bus, or wait at a bus stop hoping to be picked up.”

Charbonneau said he will keep Council informed about decisions they may have to make “over the next 72 days and 2 hours before I retire, not that I’m counting the days.”

Budget article update - Wednesday 6:00 pm

(At their meeting today, Frontenac County Council considered proposals which would have brought their 2018 budget levy down by up to $150,000, but in the end only managed to make the most superficial of cuts to the document.

But pity the poor foster kids!

A 6,000 expenditure to support a scholarship program for foster children in Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, was cut from the budget. The impact of the cut was to lower the budget levy by 0.06%. The only other change to the budget that was made by council was to remove another $6,400 from taxation by cutting almost half of the budget for a parking lot restoration project at the county offiuce/Fairmount Home complex.

All in the levy to ratepayers has been reduced from $9.775 million to $9.763 million, a decrease of a little over a tenth of one per cent. The net increase in the levy to ratepayers has been set a 4.4%.

The other potential changes that would have had a greater impact did not have enough support from Council to come to fruition.

A motion to cut the $55,061 contribution to the University Hospital Foundation of Kingston, which was made by North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins, did not receive a seconder.

The only major dispute of the morning came when Warden Ron Vandewal proposed that the ambulance that is stationed on Wolfe Island could be replaced with a cheaper option using a single paramedic and a first response vehicle. The transport ambulance would come from Kingston off the soon to be upgraded ferry service. This would save about $100,000 per year, and a portion of those savings would go to Frontenac County ratepayers.

Chief of Paramedic Services Paiul Charbonneau said that the alternative service would be a good fit for Wolfe Islands and would serve the residents as well as the traditional ambulance that has been phased in.

That did not sit well with Frontenac Islands Mayor Dennis Doyle however.

“Just like we voted to support the K&P Trail and Economic Development, I would ask that the county support the residents of Wolfe Island by completing the phase-in of ambulance service that this council started in 2015.”

Council stood with Doyle.

The draft 2018 budget thus remained intact, with the only losers from today’s process being part of a parking lot and a foster child who will not get a scholarship.

Overall spending for Frontenac County, which stood at $41.3 milliom in the draft budget, remains at $41.3 million. The $26,000 decrease in total expenditures (0.06%) falls within the rounding error.

The following was published before the meeting on Wednesday morning, and is based on the content of the draft budget, which as explained above, has remained fundamentally intact in its final incarnation

Perhaps Kelly Pender sky dives on the weekends, but in his working life the Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer is averse to risk and drama. As far as the annual Frontenac County budget is concerned, he has been preaching from the gospel of predictable, controlled budget increases over time.

This has taken a lot of the drama out of the annual Frontenac County budget process, which was never a riveting spectacle to witness even before Pender took the helm.

This year Frontenac County Council has moved away from the very general; approving the parameters of the budget in conceptual terms in September, to the very specific; looking at individual projects as add-ons to the budget in late October.

This week they received, for the first and likely the last time, a draft budget document. It contains few surprises.

The number that matters in 2018 will be $9,775,000, that’s how much will be levied to the four Frontenac Townships if Council accepts the budget as presented Wednesday morning (This article will be updated on Frontenacnews.ca at that time) The townships will then collect that money from Frontenac County properties.

This projected levy is over $400,000 higher than it was in 2017, an increase of 4.5%.

Most of that increase came about as the result of previous decisions by this Council.

They indicated at their meeting in September that they would like to see an operating budget, including service enhancements, come in at under 1.5%, the figure for the increase in the consumer price index (CPI) for the year as calculated in late August.

Treasurer Susan Brandt, working her first budget as the lead official (she was the Deputy Treasurer until replacing the retired Marion Vanbruinessen earlier this year) followed last year’s practice and added 0.6% to that target, based on figures for the projected increase in property assessment that was provided by the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation.

By keeping the operating budget increase to 1.1% ($104,117), adding 0.89% ($83,550) for new projects, and using $88,000 from reserve funds, the result was a 2% increase. This increase includes a new overnight Personal Support Worker shift at Fairmount Home and a new Human Resources position, as well as $35,000 for the Economic Development Department.

Added to the 2% increase from this year’s process are increases resulting from commitments made earlier in the mandate of this council. The largest of those is 1.78% ($166,7782) for two service enhancements of the Frontenac Paramedic Services, which are being phased in. One is on Wolfe Island, which is now fully funded, and the other is the second of three increases for a new overnight ambulance in Kingston. Another 0.65% ($60,787) is devoted to increase the reserve fund for capital projects, which has been in place for three years now and will continue to effect future budgets.

All together, the increase rounds off to just about 4.5%

Because of the incremental process and the weight of prior commitments, there is little to be decided when the entire package is presented this week. All of the spending increases have been approved in principle at previous meetings, but Council is not bound by those prior decisions.

Based on the discussions that took place earlier, the only item that is at all likely to re-surface is the commitment to provide $55,000 each year for ten year to the University Hospital Foundation of Kingston. That was approved in a vote of 6-3 and may come up for a final vote before the budget is signed, sealed and delivered.

Whether approved with or without amendments, the enacting bylaw for the budget will not be before Council until their meeting on December 20th.

(Frontenac County’s overall spending budget for 2018 will be $41.3 million, up 3% ($1.2 million) from 2017. Most of the money required to deliver Frontenac County Services is provided by the Province of Ontario and the City of Kingston, which provide the lion’s share of funding for the two largest County operations (Fairmount Home and Frontenac Paramedic Services)

In 2008 a consultant's report called for an ambulance base to be built at the junction of Roads 509 and Ardoch Road in Central Frontenac to serve residents in North and Central Frontenac and motorists on Highway 7 between Kaladar and Brooke Valley.

A lot happened after that, including a plan to build a base and a fire hall in Ompah, but after six years a base was opened in July of 2014 at the corner of Road 509 and Robertsville Road, a few kilometres from where the consultant's report had recommended, but in North Frontenac.

Since then, the base has been a success, serving residents in North and Central Frontenac as well as Lanark Highlands and Tay Valley townships, and motorists on Highway 7. It was originally going to be a satellite base, meaning crews would start and end their 12-hour shift at the Parham base and would then drive north, but from the day it opened it has been a full base, offering 12 hours of service.

Now, two years and two months after it opened, it has received a LEED Silver designation for its design and building materials. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It is a rating system that awards points for everything from the materials used, the use of passive solar heating, and intangibles such as the placement of bicycle racks in parking lots.

At a ceremony marking the LEED certification last week, the contractor who built the base was on hand, as was County Warden Frances Smith, North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins, Frontenac County Chief of Paramedic Services Paul Charbonneau, and the paramedics who were on duty at the time.

“Both of the bases Frontenac County has built since taking on responsibility for paramedic services have been LEED certified,” said Charbonneau. “The Sydenham base is gold certified and this one obtained the silver. The effort to achieve this standard is consistent with the county's commitment to sustainability.”

Warden Smith, nearby in Central Frontenac, not far from the base's location, said, “It's wonderful to have such a good facility available to us here in the northern part of the county.”

LEED is a rating system that is a recognized mark of excellence for green building in 150 countries.