Frontenac County Council On The Brink

Jeff Green | Mar 28, 2013

Frontenac County Council had poked and prodded at their 2013 budget for a couple of months, and they had managed to get it to the point where county ratepayers would be paying no more than they did last year. The requisition to the townships was down by 0.34%.

To get to this point, both Chief Administrative Officer Liz Savill and Treasurer Marian VanBruinessen had been told they could not hire extra staff to run their offices, as they had been requesting.

So, in a sense it is not surprising that Warden Gutowski asked Council to pass the budget last week. The County needs to tell all of its funders, which include the City of Kingston and the Government of Ontario, as well as the four Frontenac townships, how much money to send in this year.

But the vote was lost, soundly, 6-3.

What does that mean?

At the very least it means that the Council must meet again, sooner rather than later, and must find some way to decide which budget items need to be reviewed, and what changes need to be made in order for at least two votes to switch from no to yes. The clock is ticking and we are already into the second quarter of the year.

What happened last week was, in part, another demonstration of the disconnect between the warden and the majority of Council. Only two of the other seven council members (as mayor of South Frontenac, Gary Davison has 2 votes) were willing to stand with her and support the budget.

More significant however, is the fact that in comments throughout the budget process and in the vote as well, council demonstrated a lack of faith in the material presented to them by the county treasurer. In particular, Councilor Jones from Frontenac Islands talked repeatedly about staff “squirreling away funds to reserves” and at one point last week Mayor Davison commented “Are they telling us we should just be quiet and sign the cheque?”

Marion VanBruinessen has been the County Treasurer since municipal amalgamation in 1998, and CAO Liz Savill has also been in place since then. For members of council to feel comfortable making these kinds of statements in open council meetings, in front of all of the county managers and the media as well, is more than a breach of decorum.

When a Council openly questions the motives of their most senior staff, you have to start wondering where this is all going. Council has to know that they do not have a complete understanding of the numbers, and if at the same time they do not trust the people who are providing them with those numbers, what are they going to base their decisions upon?

I have never sat on a municipal council, but I have been on a number of boards for not-for-profit corporations that receive public funding. I know that as a board member, as long as I have a basic faith in the integrity and the competence of the senior people in the organisation, the burden of responsibility for spending public funds rests lightly on my shoulders. If that faith wavers, that burden becomes a heavy one.

In spite of all the rhetoric, as extreme as it has been, I'm not sure that Frontenac County is quite at that point

Early this week, I interviewed Dennis Doyle, the mayor of Frontenac Islands and one of the major voices of dissent on County Council. I asked him what he is looking for in the county budget. I asked him how much of a cut he wanted to see in county taxes. Was it 3%? 5%?

He said his concern was not so much with taxes but with the overall operating costs of the County, whether those costs are covered by local taxes or by other levels of government. In particular he is concerned about the increases in operating costs at Fairmount Home, the land ambulance service, and county administration. He also said there is an urgency to address this in 2013 because it is the third year of this council's mandate, and next year will be an election year.

After two years of attempting to make some real change in the direction of county finances, Doyle feels that this is the year that this council will either make its mark or will fail to do so.

That explains, at least from his point of view, why the majority of council are willing to confront the warden, the CAO and the treasurer. Doyle feels, rightly or wrongly, that it costs more to do things in Frontenac County than it does elsewhere, and he wants that addressed, both in the budget and in a subsequent debate about the size and uses of reserve funds by Frontenac County.

The question is, are there any real savings to be found in county operations, and if so, where are they?

But given the state of relations between the players at the county table, there is a more basic problem to be solved. An equilibrium must be found, respect must be re-established; there must be a level of trust between the Council as a whole and the senior staff.

Once lost, trust can be harder to find than savings.