City of Kingston to pay up for Frontenac Paramedic Services and Fairmount Home, but not happily

Jeff Green | Aug 12, 2020

The Council of the City of Kingston unanimously endorsed a proposal by Mayor Bryan Paterson to end a dispute with Frontenac County over how much the city is billed annually to cover its share of costs to run land ambulance services and the Fairmount Home.

The proposal effectively ends a two year long debate between the two bodies over how much Kingston ratepayers should be billed for the shared services, which under a 20 year old provincially mandated arrangement, are managed by Frontenac County even though the lion's share of the municipal funding for them comes from City of Kingston ratepayers.

And the proposal also calls for the city to pay whatever the county asks for in the future, without asking for any reporting by the county. The costs will no longer be included in the city budget, and will appear as a separate Frontenac County levy on the tax bills that go out to Kingston residents, starting in 2021.

Paterson said it is a matter of transparency for the ratepayers. 

“Since city council has no say in how much city residents are being charged for those services, it is best to separate the charges out on the bill. They can direct any questions they may have to Frontenac County,” he said.

While they all agreed, city council members, and Mayor Paterson, are not particularly happy about the arrangement.

In a telephone interview with the Frontenac News on the day before his proposal came before city council in the form of a motion, Paterson explained how, in his view, the position he is taking now is consistent with what he said back in early May, in a letter to Frontenac County Warden Frances Smith.

“I indicated in May that while the City of Kingston recognises the authority of the county to set rates for the two services, there was an expectation on our part that consultation would occur. This dispute is two years old and we tried on several fronts to work out a compromise with the county. It became clear to me that the county wasn’t willing to compromise. This came out in mediation in June as well. They decide how much money we have to pay them,” he said.

He added that the dispute was set to go to arbitration, “which would cost hundreds of thousands in legal fees and take a long time to sort out. I did not want the paramedics and frontline workers at Fairmount Home, who have been working so hard, particularly this year, to go through the stress of that.”

When he spoke to his fellow council members about the proposal, he talked about the initial decision of City Council, from two years ago. At that time council decided that Frontenac County should set the same target that City departments and other entities that the city funds set for themselves, a 2.5% increase.

“But the county has been coming in with an increase of 10%, 4 times our target. We have tried to find some middle ground, unsuccessfully. They have made it clear they are not an agency of the city and are not subject to our budget targets.”

All other agencies and boards which appear before the city during budget deliberations with funding requests, including Conservation Authorities, the public library, and public health, have some representation from the city, either a city council member or a city appointee, on the board that oversees their operations.

“In terms of structure, the county is the only organisation with which we have no control and no say in the final outcome,” said Chief Administrative Officer Lainie Hurdle.

Councillor Mary Rita Holland said “I really hope the province takes note of this. Clearly this was not what the intent was when these service agreements were put in place,” echoing a comment that Mayor Paterson made a day earlier to the News.

“It points to the fact that 20 plus years after amalgamation with these shared services agreements in place, they haven’t worked perfectly.”

Deputy Mayor Jim Neill described the situation as “taxation without representation” and then said “we have public committees in areas where the bulk of the funding comes from the City of Kingston, and we invite the county to come on these committees – library, public health, housing and homelessness. It is unfortunate that the county has taken the stand that they don’t need to include us. If we were really petty and really petulant, we wouldn’t have representatives on those committees, however I don’t think we need to be as small as the county is on this issue. We should request representation on their committees.”

When asked by one member of council, if under some hypothetical circumstances, some time in the future, could this be opened up to a more representative system, Paterson said “I would welcome this, my door would continue to be open for that.”

Frontenac County Warden Frances Smith was informed about the pending motion to City Council last Wednesday (August 5) when she received a call from Mayor Paterson shortly before he announced his intention to table the motion in a twitter video filmed outside of Kingston City Hall.

She said, in a telephone interview on the morning of Tuesday, August 11, that she is “certainly pleased that the city is opting not to go down the road to arbitration which would have cost both of us a lot of money in legal fees. 

She pointed out that this issue only surfaced in 2019, “when city staff decided to lump us in with service agencies. They never did that before. Since 1999 there has been no issue. I don’t know why they decided to make that change. We are always ready to explain where the money is going, for our own ratepayers and the city as well, but the agreement does not leave it open to negotiations over costs.”

She said that if any ratepayers, from Kingston or Frontenac County, are looking for information about any item on the county budget, including Paramedic Services and Fairmount Home, “they are welcome to call us, we can show them our budget.”

In June, before the failed mediation between the two parties, Frontenac County Council called for a joint meeting of the two councils to discuss the details of the budgets for the two services. The offer was declined and the meeting never took place.

“We invited Kingston City Council to come to the table and sit with us. They chose not to come. If they had come, we would have shown them, as we had communicated to them before, how the paramedic services increases were tied to a three-year phase in of a new service in the west end of the city, where there has been a lot of growth. It is growth in the city that is responsible for the cost increases, in order to keep response times short.”