Frontenac County Council – Oct 17/12

Jeff Green | Oct 25, 2012

Unique boundary proposal would create Kingston-Frontenac L&A riding.

At the Frontenac County Council meeting on Oct. 17, CAO Liz Savill presented the submission she will be making to the electoral boundary commission for council's approval.

The submission makes a number of points that have been made by Hastings and Lennox and Addington County and others ever since the proposed boundaries were released in early September.

Among other features, those boundaries would split Frontenac County into three ridings.

As Savill’s submission acknowledges, all of the other proposals are similar to the current riding boundaries, in which Frontenac County is in a riding that includes Lanark County.

Arguing that Lanark County is more oriented to Ottawa and Frontenac County to Kingston, Savill proposes a Frontenac, Lennox and Addington riding that includes the former Kingston and Pittsburgh townships in rural Kingston. This would shrink the Kingston and the Islands riding but would create a riding anchored by the populations living within proximity to Highway 401, including the Town of Napanee and Loyalist Township, as well as parts of South Frontenac and Kingston.

In addition, it would create a riding of Hastings-Belleville and calls for a new riding of Lanark-Carleton, which would include the rural west end of Ottawa and all of Lanark County.

Savill points out that Frontenac County has only been coupled with Lanark for the past 10 years. Her proposal is similar to the way things were before that, with the exception of the alteration of Kingston and the Islands, which is an established riding, but one that has grown in population to the point that it is now 17.9% higher than the norm of 106,000. The proposed Kingston and the Islands riding would be closer to the norm, but the Kingston Frontenac riding would be well short of the quota at 90,000.

The presentation will form the Frontenac County submission to the public hearing on electoral boundaries on November 8 in Kingston. 

Members of Frontenac County Council took turns objecting to a number of late-year initiatives and relatively minor expenditures (relative to the $40 million county budget) at their penultimate regular meeting of 2012 on October 17.

These objections did not result in outright rejections of any proposed measures, with councillors opting only to defer considerations of the matters to future meetings.

Frontenac Islands Councilor David Jones started the ball rolling when he questioned a proposal from County Labour Relations Specialist Colleen Hickey that a Corporate Services Organisational review be undertaken at a cost of $40,000.

In a report, Hickey pointed out that there are now 21 corporate service positions at the county, serving both Council and its committees as well as the two front-line services offered by the County (Fairmount Home and Frontenac Paramedic Services).

Of those, seven were created after a 2006 organisational review of the county was completed. These positions include Hickey’s own position as well as an IT Specialist, Occupational Health Nurse (Fairmount), Manager of Sustainability Planning, GIS Specialist, Communications Specialist, and Community Planner.

Even with this increase, the report says that corporate services are facing “significant workload challenges and expectations placed on its services and activities. Primarily these increased challenges are attributable to increased provincial reporting and legislative requirements and to the six Council committees now fully operational.”

“I don’t understand why this is coming before us in the midst of a budget year. Why the rush?” asked Councilor David Jones.

County Chief Administrative Officer Liz Savill replied, “The urgency is that we have been living with problems for years. We want this done before the 2013 budget. That is the intent.”

Dennis Doyle, the Mayor of Frontenac Islands, suggested that the proposal be deferred until a strategic planning exercise is completed in November.

The motion to defer was passed.

Ambulance vehicle replacement

A report from Financial Services that touched on amortization of vehicles, funding models, replacement costs, the impact of emission standards and the lifespan of new gas-powered models as compared to diesel-powered models from the past, sparked another series of questions from Council.

Treasurer Marion Vanbruinessen recommended that ambulances be amortised over 4.5 years instead of 6 years, as they are currently. This, she said, would result in more provincial funding (the province pays for half the amortisation costs of vehicles) and better reflects that fact that newer ambulances, which are gas-powered, do not last as long as the old diesel models, which are out of production.

Members of Council wanted to know if the change would necessitate ambulances being replaced after 4.5 years, even if they are still running well.

Deputy Chief Gale Chevalier, sitting in at the meeting for the absent Chief of Paramedic Services, Paul Charbonneau, said, “Certainly if at the end of 4.5 years, the vehicle is running well, keeping it longer is something we could consider.”

“I think the way these things go, if we don’t spell out that the vehicles are not to be automatically replaced after four and a half years, that’s what will happen. I think we should put something in the motion about that,” said South Frontenac Mayor Gary Davison.

In the end, the matter was deferred to the County Finance committee for review.

Medical tiered response

A report regarding proposed changes to the kinds of ambulance calls that are extended to fire departments in both Kingston and Frontenac County received a brusque response from South Frontenac Mayor Gary Davison, as South Frontenac Fire Chief Rick Chesebrough looked on.

Davison referred to the fact that the report made use of a study completed in the Peterborough area which concluded that a number of non-urgent calls for ambulance service do not require fire fighters to provide first response,

“Most of our firefighters do more than first aid, they are trained first responders,” he said. “I would like to see more local information on this, not information from Peterborough.

A motion to receive the tiered response report was deferred until next month.