Frontenac County did not quite snub the City of Kingston, Pender says

Dec 04, 2019

Members of Kingston City Council were disappointed last week when Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender did not show up to brief them on how much the city will be charged for the delivery of land ambulance service and Fairmount Home in 2020.

Both services are operated by Frontenac County, with funding support from the Province of Ontario, City of Kingston ratepayers and Frontenac County ratepayers.

At a budget meeting on November 26, city council member Wayne Hill is quoted in the Whig Standard article as saying “I don’t understand why they are not here tonight. It seems to me they don’t want to answer these questions in front of Council. It leaves us really blind.”

When contacted this week from his office at Frontenac County headquarters in Glenburnie, Pender said the real question in the matter is not whether he attended or not, but why his name was on the agenda in the first place.

“When we met with the mayor and other city officials at RULAC [Rural Urban Liaison Committee] on October 30th, I told them that I could give them a number for each of the services in 2020, but it would almost certainly be wrong. We won’t know until we find out how much the province is paying into those budgets next year, and we don’t know when they are going to tell us.”

Pender said that, even after informing the city that the budget numbers are not available, in early November he received an invitation to the November 26 city budget meeting.

“I informed them that I would not be attending the November 26 meeting, for reasons that I made clear to them once again. Apparently my name was not removed from the agenda and Council still expected someone to be there from Frontenac County.”

When Frontenac County Council met in October to work on their own 2020 budget, the amount paid by the province in 2019 to support Frontenac Paramedic Services (land ambulance) and Fairmount Home was plugged into the budget. Pender told his council the same thing he told City of Kingston officials, that the number was certainly wrong for 2020.

Pender said this week that he does not expect to have final numbers in time for the Frontenac County Council meeting on December 18, and Frontenac County will likely go into 2020 without an approved budget.

“The provincial numbers may not be available until provincial budget time in March,” Pender said over the phone on Tuesday (December 3).

“At some point we will need to approve our budget in order to set a tax rate for our member municipalities to plug in to their tax bills. But it won’t be on December 18.”

He added that once the province tells Frontenac County how much they will be contributing for 2020, he will bring that information to Frontenac County Council. Once Frontenac County Council finalises the budgets for Frontenac Paramedic Services and Fairmount Home, that information will be provided to the City of Kingston.

The City of Kingston has requested that all third-party agencies that they fund, keep any increases to 2.5%, the same request that they made in 2019.

In 2019, the bill to Kingston for Frontenac Paramedic Services was up by 7.7% over 2018 and the bill for Fairmount Home was up by 5.2%.

City staff managed to find money in reserves to cover most of the increase, which was not accounted for in the 2019 Kingston budget, but at a Kingston City Council meeting in September, the decision was taken to withhold the last $200,000 from amount levied to the city by Frontenac County for the services.

Frontenac County has not backed down, and the matter of the $200,000 payment is now the subject of mediation.

Under a separate agreement, the City of Kingston provides children’s services, Ontario Works and social housing services for Frontenac County, and levies funds to Frontenac County ratepayers to cover a portion of those costs. For 2020, the levy for children’s services and Ontario Works is up, by 6.6%, while the social housing levy is down, by 4.4%.