Strong Mayor Powers Have Changed Municipal Budgeting, At Least In Central Frontenac
The first big example of how strong mayor powers will change the way councils work is upon us now.
Instead of Staff receiving instructions from Council, and then preparing and presenting a draft budget to Council, under strong mayor powers, the mayor prepares and presents the budget, and Council will then look at it, propose amendments where necessary, and vote for it or against it.
We are now seeing what happens when this is put into practice.
Central Frontenac has traditionally finalised their budget in the early spring of the year, North Frontenac earlier in the winter, and South Frontenac late in the previous fall, but there has been a shift this year. South Frontenac will pass their 2026 budget in January, and Central Frontenac is planning to have their budget in place next month, before the year starts.
So, with Central Frontenac being first up, we see one version of a strong mayor budget in action. The process is well underway, although all we have in public are a few comments from Mayor Smith as part of her opening statement at council meetings.
At a meeting in October, she said she would be sitting down with staff to look at numbers, and identified 5% increase, as a target. Council did not balk at that.
At the most recent Central Frontenac meeting, just last week, wedged in with comments about Remembrance Day and who will get to see comments from the public that are being gathered in a t survey that is now open and available on the township website, Mayor Smith said, almost in passing,; “I've got to tell you that I have spent about 20 hours this week, going through numbers. We started really high, and we're down to a little over 5%. It's a tough one though, because there is so much that we need, that we just can't afford to have. But that will be coming in another meeting.”
That was the extent of it, but it shows the impact of Strong Mayors on budgeting,
The way that the budget went from 'really high' to 'just over 5%' was overseen by Mayor Smith. The 'needs that we just can't afford' were defined by Mayor Smith. Council will see a draft budget that is pretty much ready for adoption at a special meeting on December 4.
Every township has its own budget process, and Central Frontenac has always been quite different from the other Frontenac townships, so the strong mayor budget will not be the same elsewhere, but the Central Frontenac process is certainly what the province envisions under the new powers.
This very different for Central Frontenac, and it is hard not to see the role of council as anything but diminished.
Because Central Frontenac has been dealing with an incremental budget crisis for years, the process has been for Treasurer Michael McGovern to bring a budget based on the legislated requirements for the township. This includes an attempt to maintain township infrastructure at a functional level, including the road network.
These budgets carry increases of over 10% most years, and after discussion with Council, some increasingly creative ways to find money from unplanned surpluses in the previous year's budget, grants and careful draw downs of reserves, in addition to cuts and deferrals of projects, the number comes down, generally to 'just over 5%'.
It appears that this process, which is public, subject to comments by members of council along the way, will be truncated this year.
The sausage will be made in private, with the mayor, the treasurer and the CAO looking at the numbers behind closed doors.
It is unlikely that this will make a substantive difference when it comes to the outcome. In Central Frontenac, the numbers rule, the politicians only get to see them, and staff is tasked with manipulating them into the most palatable form they can.
Strong mayor powers don't change any of that.
But it does change the role of Council.
If there are decisions to be made about one priority as opposed to another, council members had an opportunity to talk about it, while the budget was being developed. In order to do so now, they will have to come to the presentation of the budget, ready to bring things back that have already been cut, in most cases, and they will likely need to find something else to cut in its place, because nobody wants to be personally responsible for an extra tax increase, particularly in the last budget before an election.
Last year, and every year before that, there were a couple of days of meetings where Council heard each department head go over the needs of their department, and their spending plans. Having sat through some of those meetings as a reporter, I can tell you they are not exciting meetings. But they have a function for members of council, and any member of the public with time on their hands. For the council members, those boring meetings tell them what is going on, and they can ask questions and form opinions about what is working, and what is not working.
If indeed, those meetings have been replaced by the mayor sitting down with staff, it is a less representative system under strong mayor powers, than it was before.
We will see if this indeed is what is going on in Central Frontenac when the budget does get presented, and we will see if the other townships follow a similar, or a much different process.
Either way, it should make the election for mayor in Frontenac County municipalities a more consequential one in 2026, than it was in 2022. ■
