AH Council

Craig Bakay | Dec 18, 2019

There wasn’t a whole lot going on at Addington Highlands final Council meeting of the year in Denbigh Tuesday afternoon, according at the Reeve Henry Hogg.

“We did meet in closed session as we have a union contract coming up but I can’t talk to you about that,” he said Tuesday evening.

The union contract will have implications for compensation for non-unionized staff as well as Council however but that won’t be discussed until the union contract is finalized.

Other than that, they did have a presentation from the County on physician recruitment and retention but Hogg was skeptical that much would come out of it.

“I guess the way the province is going, we’re not sure what will happen,” he said. “If things are headquartered in Kingston, we won’t be too important to them up here.

“They have a couple of hundred thousand people down there and we have a couple of thousand. I can’t see us being a high priority. But I’ve been up on that soapbox before.”

Another soapbox is the high costs of insurance.

“It just gets more expensive every year,” he said. “But we have to have it and the province also mandates that we have to have Workers’ Safety and Insurance Board coverage for our firefighters. And the maximum ceiling for that is going up to $95,400 (from $92,600 in 2019).

And as a matter of housekeeping duties, it was also time to transfer “underspents” to reserves, with any unused funds being moved into the appropriate reserves.

When it was pointed out that Addington Highlands seems to have more unspent funds to transfer than many municipalities, Hogg said: “maybe we’re a little closer with what we spend.”

Council also received an end-of-the-year report on emergency preparedness, when had one particular aspect that caught Hogg’s eye.

“Cyber attacks are something we’re seeing more of these days,” he said. “I see there was one on health care records just the other day. We have some security measures in place but we’re going to investigate further. But these guys always seem to be one step ahead of you and they can hold you hostage.”

Hogg said Council is now done until the middle of January but noted that the concrete has been poured for the new office addition.

“We may be meeting in new Council chambers by summer,” he said.