Frontenac County to hire a new ED Officer after all

Jeff Green | Nov 16, 2016

At a special meeting on November 2, members of Frontenac County Council listened to a 20 minute presentation from Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender and Manager of Planning and  
Development Services Joe Gallivan about the merits of hiring a new Economic Development Officer to replace the retiring Anne-Marie Young.

The meeting, which was devoted to only that topic, came about as the result of a notice of motion at the previous meeting by North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins.
Higgins notice of motion asked that the =hiring process for the position be frozen until council has time to consider contracting out
the service.

Rather than put off the hiring, Pender suggested the special meeting to settle the matter. In their presentations, Pender and Gallivan outlined some of the goals of the department going forward.

“An Economic Development department does not create jobs,” Pender said at the end of the detailed presentation. “It is people who want to start a business in a specific location who create jobs. We don’t make that happen. But when someone calls us and they find out that in order to start something up they will have to undertake a long, expensive planning process, that’s how we lose them. That’s why planning and economic development need to work together, and outsourcing economic development brings risk.”

“There is a lot of good detail in this report,” said Frontenac Islands Mayor Dennis Doyle. “Back in 2008 we made a conscious decision at this table to divert the Economic Development Officer’s time to the K&P Trail. Now we are pulling that back to none. I’m generally in favour of keeping on the track we are on. Outsourcing makes me nervous.”

One by one, Councilors spoke out in favour of hiring a new Economic Development Officer.

South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal, who as chair of the meeting, spoke out only at the end.

“If this goes through, as I think it will, we need to make sure that whoever has that position works with people at the CFDC [Community Futures Development Corporation] and KEDCO [Kingston Economic Development Corporation] and not against them.”

There were 7 members of Council at the meeting, John Inglis from North Frontenac was absent, and 6 of them supported the motion. Ron Vandewal voted against it.

As Pender told Council at their previous meeting, a short list of candidates has been developed, and interviews can now proceed.

Anne-Marie Young will be retiring at the end of the year.