Frances Smith Announces She Will Retire After This Term Of Council
Central Frontenac will have a new mayor after the municipal election in October of next year.
Mayor Frances Smith, who has held the position since 2014, used the occasion of delivering her mayor’s remarks at the beginning of a regular meeting of council last Tuesday (November 25), to say that she intends to retire as mayor.
“I want to let folks know that I will not be returning to this seat at the end of this election year. If somebody is interested in a job, it’s a job and a half, you are more than welcome to it.
“I think I’ve been doing it for close to 40 years, not this particular job but some job in the municipality, and I’m actually going to retire and see if I can keep myself busy.”
When contacted later in the week over the phone, she said that she decided to make a public statement about her intentions in order to provide as much opportunity as possible to anyone who would like to prepare their campaign.
When Smith was first elected mayor in 2014, s he also had a management role in Hastings County at the social services office in Madoc, and at first she intended to keep that role on a part-time basis, but soon after her election she realised that her obligations as mayor were more extensive than they had been in pre-amalgamation times, and resigned from Hastings County.
Filling Senior staffing positions, those of Chief Administrator and Public Works Manager, were an issue in Central Frontenac when Smith came as mayor in 2014, and those issues lingered for several years. Stability at the top was established when Cathy MacMunn was appointed to the role. MacMunn was an internal appointee, who came on after a series of external hires did not work out. Smith and MacMunn are the only remaining politicians or municipal employees in Frontenac County who were involved in municipal politics before municipal amalgamation in 1998, with the notable exception of South Frontenac Councillor Ron Sleeth.
Smith’s first municipal role was as clerk in the former Oso municipality, which included the hamlet of Sharbot Lake and Crow Lake village, in the mid 1980s. She later switched over to the political side, and served as reeve of Oso in the 1990s. She was the Frontenac County warden in 1996, the 4th woman to assume that role, in what was then a 135 year old County (the others were Dorothy Gaylord, 1976, Barbara Srpoule, 1982, and Isabel Turner, 1994).
She left municipal politics when Oso merged with three neighbouring townships to form Central Frontenac in 1998.
But that first municipal retirement did not take, and she came back, as an Oso ward councilor in 2003, when she was appointed to serve out a term after the elected councillor resigned, because they moved out of the area. She was elected to council twice, and then defeated incumbent Mayor Janet Gutowski in the race for mayor in 2014. She has not faced an election since, having been acclaimed in both 2018 and 2022.
She has also served as warden three more times, in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Earlier this year, Smith expressed her frustration with the current council, which has been more divided than previous councils on a number of issues, at a meeting in May, during a discussion about how new strong mayor powers will be implemented in the township. She retracted her comments at a subsequent meeting and apologised to Council, and the tenor of the meetings since then has been less divisive.
She also mentioned that she has had some health issues to deal with in recent months, which factored into her decision to retire and make an early annnouncement about her decision.
The election in 2026 will be the first time that the mayor's race will not include an incumbent, since the first Central Frontenac election in the fall of 1997. Bill Macdonald served as mayor for 9 years before being defeated by Janet Gutowski in October of 2006, and Gutowski served two four year terms before being defeated by Frances Smith in October 2014.
