Frances Smith

Oct 09, 2014

Mayor

Frances Smith – former reeve and warden, seeking to be mayor

When the election results are announced on October 27 it will also be an anniversary of sorts, 20 years since the last time Frances Smith faced an election night in a bid to be elected head of Council.

In October, 1994 she was re-elected as reeve of Oso Township, and she was serving as warden of Frontenac County as the so-called “shot-gun wedding” that led to the formation of North, Central, and South Frontenac, Frontenac Islands, and the amalgamated City of Kingston took place.

Frances took a hiatus from municipal politics after amalgamation, but not a long one. When Mike Beattie, a councilor in what had become ward 3 (Oso) of Central Frontenac, resigned and moved away from Sharbot Lake in 2002, she was appointed to Council. She has since been elected ward 3 councilor on three consecutive occasions.

Frances Smith supervises the Madoc Ontario Works office for Hastings County, and now that she is nearing the end of her career as a social services supervisor, she has decided to take a run for mayor.

Before entering municipal politics in the early 1990s, she worked as the clerk of Oso Township in the early to mid- 1980s, and then ran a garden centre and landscaping business after that.

If elected mayor she said she would take a back seat on the Economic Development portfolio, but would be more active in providing oversight over township operations.

“I would not be the mover and shaker on the Economic Development Committee,” she said, “I would encourage them to continue, but I see the committee now more as an event planning group. The best economic development role a mayor can play is to ensure the township has a good reputation. When you are in Toronto, you get a chance to talk it up. We certainly have to sell the township when we get an opportunity, but the township does not create jobs or new businesses.”

As someone who has dealt with poverty issues in her professional life, and knows of some of the difficulties a number of Central Frontenac residents face making ends meet, she is concerned about making sure tax money is well spent,

“We are told that Council should not micro-manage staff, and that is true, but people are paying a lot of money in taxes, and we are responsible for making sure that money is well spent and that crews have the training they need and do the job they are paid to do. That's our prime responsibility.”

She also said she would like to see Council take a more active role.

“I would like to see council get involved in debating issues. Sometimes it takes a long time, particularly for new members, to feel comfortable, but it is important for every councilor to have their input. Everybody votes on everything, and we all have only one vote, so I need to listen to council, and councilors need to concern themselves with all the issues, not only the ones in their own area,” she said.

In terms of the mayor's role on Frontenac County Council, Smith thinks it is “important but not central. I need to concern myself with what is going on in my own area first, in Central Frontenac. The county has its role, of course, but sometimes it is removed from us. It runs Fairmount Home, and that is a county priority, but the reality is that Central Frontenac residents don't go there. They go to Pine Meadow, and I still don't see why Frontenac County wouldn't find a bit of money to support Pine Meadow's rebuilding project. $25,000 per year for five years from a county that has a $40 million annual budget wouldn't have broken us.”

She is also concerned about Central Frontenac using the county as a contract planner, because the county is also the approval agency for planning decisions made by the township.

“When the county Official Plan was being debated in public only South Frontenac had anything to say. The rest of us are contracting our planning from the office that was presenting the document that we will need to follow. That is a problem,” she said.

She also said that in her view the position of mayor is not a full-time position.

“The mayor needs to be available and with technology today, I won’t need to sit in an office. The job is a couple of days per week but lots of evening and weekend work. I would not have put my name on the ballot if I didn’t think I could do the job well. I will be flexible and available and will rearrange my work life as needed, which could include retirement and moving to part-time work.”