Change is afoot

Jeff Green | Nov 26, 2014

A few weeks ago there was a municipal election, as some of us vaguely remember. However, because of the way things are set up by the province, the election is followed by a bit of a dead zone, a month or so when the soon-to-be-former councils continue to meet as the new council members wait in the wings.

In early December that will all change and the full implications of the October elections will start to be felt.

The changes that are coming are vast. Of the 16 council members in South and Central Frontenac, 12 will be new. The mayor-elects in both townships are new as well, although both Ron Vandewal (SF) and Frances Smith (CF) have significant municipal experience.

While four of the six members of North Frontenac Council are returning, the mayor-elect, Ron Higgins, has never sat on council before.

Members of council don't ride along with grader operators, inspect building sites, or cover waste sites with fill, but they do oversee budgets and take responsibility for the overall direction of the townships. They also send two members each to Frontenac County Council, the mayor and one other, who will be selected at the first meeting of the new councils in December.

Because of the changes at the township level, there could be as few as one returning member (Dennis Doyle) to the eight-member Frontenac Council, which will meet for the first time on December 17. Two other current members of the council, John McDougall from South Frontenac, and John Inglis from North Frontenac, were re-elected in their own townships, but if they are to return to the county they will have to survive a vote at their own council.

Frontenac County Council oversees a $40 million budget.

The reality that will be faced by all of these radically changed councils is that municipal operations are heavily regulated by the provincial government, and the ability for them to effect change is limited. They will also have to learn how to navigate between the expectations of the voters and the fact that the first thing they learn when they attend orientation sessions is that council's role is to develop policies, and township staff are in charge of implementing those policies under the direction of the chief administrative officer. They are warned against the urge to micro-manage township staff.

This will no doubt frustrate many new members of council, who will think, sometimes rightly so, that this kind of talk is all about protecting the status quo and blocking change.

In addition to the changes in hte municipal world, three of the largest public sector institutions serving northern Frontenac County are about to change as well.

Bonnie George, the administrator who has steered Pine Meadow Nursing Home through a multimillion dollar redevelopment project, is leaving just as the project is about to be completed. Pine Meadow is not only the largest employer in Addington Highlands, it is also the long-term care facility of choice for residents of northern Frontenac County, Addington Highlands and parts of Stone Mills township.

Don Amos, the executive director of Northern Frontenac Community Services, the largest not-for-profit agency in Frontenac County, and a major employer in the Sharbot Lake area, is also leaving, for a job in Kingston.

Just like the politicians, neither of these two individuals provide direct service to their organizations’ clients and the day they leave their jobs the staff at both agencies will simply carry on as before, but Bonnie George and Don Amos have both been the face of their organisations to the public and to provincial funders, and have both been responsible for long-term planning.

Finally, we learned this week that Lanark County OPP will no longer be overseeing the Sharbot Lake detachment (see NF Council report). That job will be going to the Frontenac OPP office, based in Hartington, a move that is long overdue. The Kingston court (and its Sharbot Lake satellite) deal with cases generated in Frontenac County so it just makes sense to have all policing under the same umbrella as well. The changeover also means that Sergeant Sharron Brown, the relatively new commander of the Frontenac detachment (as of April) will be the senior OPP official in all of Frontenac County.

All of the institutions and municipalities mentioned above have long-standing responsibilities in our region and they all operate according to regulations and well established practices, and certainly not at the whim of their leaders.

Still, when they all face these kinds of changes, the institutions themselves can be altered in unexpected ways over time.