Social Services Administers Two Low-Income Housing Complexes In Addington Highlands

Craig Bakay | Jul 12, 2023

PELASS (Prince Edward Lennox & Addington Social Services) has two housing service locations in Addington Highlands Township, Pinegrove Apartments in Northbrook and URCA (United Roman Catholic Anglcian) non-profit housing in Flinton, Lynn Chenier and Scott Robertson told Council at its regular meeting July 4 in Flinton.

PELASS owns and administers a 25-apartment, two-storey building with an elevator (Pinegrove) which is an adult building (ie not specific to seniors), Chenier said.

“All of the units are rent-geared to income (RGI),” she said.

PELASS also serves as administrator to the URCA operation, which has 16 units (eight family units, eight seniors units and 14 units are RGI and two are market rent units).

“We provide non-profit housing providers with funding, they house low-income people and give us a report on how they did,” said Robertson.

To qualify for RGI, a person must make less than $35,000 a year and have less than $50,000 in assets, they said.

“Applicants are entered onto the waitlist based on application date unless they are experiencing or are at risk of family violence or human trafficking,” Chenier said.

In response to a question from Council about who can apply to these units based on geography, Robertson said: “Under the Human Rights Code, they can be from anywhere in Canada.

“(But) we just opened up eight new units in Tamworth and all but one was from Tamworth.”

He said the typical waiting list time is five or six years.

“For Flinton, there are 79 households on the list to live in 14 apartments,” he said. “Eighteen or 20 are seniors.”

Road Policy

Roads and Waste Manager Brett Reavie presented his draft Road Maintenance Policy that came out of the roads policy working group last March and Dep. Reeve Tony Fritsch requested that it be deferred to a future meeting so Council would have more time to study it.

Reavie said that since it is a roads policy, there is no mention of sidewalks.

He said roads Transfer Policy was included in this policy to address criteria Council to consider for accepting new roads to be maintained.

The policy includes a schedule of maintained roads, seasonally maintained roads and unmaintained roads.

Reavie said the policy will have budget implications with increasing materials costs.

“With every increase in the cost of tar and chip, we have two choices — increase the tax burden or cut back on the program,” he said. “But just because we decide not to maintain a road doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need work.”

Blue Box program

“We’ve been waiting for this for years,” Reeve Henry Hogg said when Roads and Waste Manager Brett Reavie presented a report on the Blue Box program.

“We’re still waiting,” Reavie replied.

In his report, Reavie said that in 2025, recycling of packaging and paper products in Addington Highlands will be the responsibility of Circular Materials Ontario.

“They are looking to have an agreement to maintain the services that we currently provide,” he said “(And) have provided sample contracts for s to review and suggest we have our lawyers look at them.”

Council agreed to send it to the Township lawyers.

“The intent is to give us a dollar value per ton which in theory is going to cover our costs,” he said. “(But they’re not going to give us a blank cheque to cover our costs.”

“The producer is supposed to cover our costs,” said Dep. Reeve Tony Fritsch. “But what if our costs are more than they give us?

“We’d have to levy the difference to our taxpayers. The producer is supposed to have full responsibility.”

Building Report

With 17 new homes on the books already this year and 13 new accessory buildings, CBO David Twiddy predicted that the provincial model of no more than 230 new buildings in Addington Highlands in the next 30 years might be a little low.

“That begs the question of what kind of services we’re going to have to provide,” he said. “Many smaller municipalities are looking at development charges and maybe it’s not that far off the horizon here.”

Twiddy said that “99 per cent” of the Flinton Arena is now netted over to protect from bird droppings.

He said the new generators are “totally unacceptable” in that they don’t come on automatically and have to be manually started. He said they would contact the installers and have the situation rectified.