Frontenac County Council - Mar 16/11

Jeff Green | Mar 24, 2011

by Jeff Green and Julie Druker

Smooth sailing for Frontenac Transportation Service at county – budget debate set for next week

Executive directors Don Amos of Northern Frontenac Community Services (NFCS) and David Townsend of Southern Frontenac Community Services (SFCS), along with Linda Rush, the co-ordinator of Frontenac Transportation Service, presented an outline of the amalgamated service.

The Frontenac Transportation Service combines the services of Rural Routes Transportation Service, which is run by NFCS and serves residents in North and Central Frontenac, and the transportation services by SFCS for South Frontenac residents, forming a single service for the entire mainland portion of Frontenac County. The county has been supporting both services for a number of years, all the while encouraging them to combine forces.

County Councilor, Central Frontenac Mayor Janet Gutowski, congratulated both agencies on their collaborative approach to what is a very valuable service.“This service is allowing people to stay in their homes and to get to appointments and is keeping them healthier. I am very pleased that the Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) is aware of what is happening and that they are seeing the value in this service as well.”

She said she would be supporting this year’s request for a $86,000 subsidy from the county.

County Councilor, North Frontenac Mayor Bud Clayton, wondered about collaboration with the Land O'Lakes Community Service. “Funding from the LHINs says you must be seamless with your transportation and there are folks from the north west part of North Frontenac that depend on the LOLCS for their transportation. Since you are asking this county for money, is there any way of getting some of it to LOLCS to help their rural transportation program?” he asked.

“We are not opposed to collaboration with LOLCS,” Linda Rush added. “There have been discussions with LOLCS and it is something that we have explored in the past.”

Warden Davison said, “This collaboration is something we asked for years ago and I commend both of you for your work.”

A funding request for Frontenac Transportation Services is included in the 2011 Frontenac County budget.Ompah joint firehall/ ambulance base plan grinds to a halt 

North Frontenac Mayor, County Councilor Bud Clayton expressed more than a little bit of frustration at Frontenac County Council last week as a debate over the proposed Ompah ambulance base/fire hall project dragged on.

“It is time to get the whole issue resolved and continue with the process to finally get the project built,” Clayton said.

But at the end of the day there was even less clarity over the issue. In response to a county staff report seeking direction from county council in order to proceed with a request for proposal for a project manager, the council ended up passing a motion asking staff for yet more information, thereby putting the entire project on hold once again.

Further complicating matters were the statements from a number of members of county council, which place in doubt the council's commitment to see the project come to fruition at the Ompah location.

The question that is confounding all involved at this point has to do with the size of the fire hall portion of the building and the corresponding amounts that the township and the county will pay for its construction

“At some point someone told someone that the fire hall itself would be 4000 square feet, but that is nowhere in any of our communications,” said Bud Clayton.

The revised total combined square footage of the two buildings that has been under consideration in recent weeks is for a 4,500 square foot building with a 3000 sq. foot section for the fire hall and 1500 sq. foot ambulance base.

Based on a protocol that has been agreed to on a senior staff level, the project is to be funded at a ratio of two thirds from North Frontenac Township and one third from Frontenac County.

It is this ratio that North Frontenac would like to see revisited, for two reasons. Firstly, they want some flexibility over the size of the fire hall in order to give themselves some flexibility over costs. Secondly, while estimates for ambulance base construction come in at $195 per square foot based on the cost of the recently constructed ambulance base in Sydenham, fire hall construction is less expensive, about $128 per square foot according to figures supplied by Paul Charbonneau, the Director of Emergency Services for Frontenac County.

North Frontenac would like the county to affirm their commitment for an upset limit of $300,000 towards the project, and has agreed to a county staff requirement that the project be completed using a project manager and a design-build construction contract following LEED environmental construction guidelines. The township would pay the rest of the cost.

“We might have to think of being flexible in our design to get the costs in line. We might have to reduce the size of the fire hall without affecting the ambulance base,” said North Frontenac County Councilor John Inglis.

But once the debate at county council was joined, it did not stick to the narrow issue of cost ratios. It quickly expanded to revisit the decision to build an ambulance base in Ompah in the first place, particularly because that decision also committed the county to replacing the existing Parham base with a new one in Sharbot Lake

Councilor Gutowski again aired her concerns about that move.

“I wonder, is there is a chance to revisit that issue?” she asked. “Not only was there no GIS mapping in 2008 when the analysis was done but in my mind I cannot separate the spending of $300,000 now and the extra $800,000 that is going to come as a result of this.”

When the decision was made in 2008, Paul Charbonneau said that the two options that he proposed would ultimately costing about the same amount of money because the cost of purchasing the Parham base, which the county now rents, and the county’s share of the Ompah project costs are about the same.

“All we want to do at this time is to get on with the project and build what county council has agreed to build in North Frontenac,” Bud Clayton reiterated in response to Janet Gutowski's comments. “The fire hall will likely go up at the cost of approximately $125-$130/square foot and the ambulance base at $200/per square foot and both buildings will be somewhat around the same size.”

Warden Gary Davidson said, “I'm a bit concerned with those numbers. If you think you can build for 60% of the cost of what we are building at, I wonder about the quality of that proposed building. Just what are we building here? A pig in a poke? I would like to see some drawings.”

Janet Gutowski wondered if these two buildings are not really better off being addressed as two separate projects.

“The sizes of the buildings have not yet been clarified so I am uncomfortable supporting a recommendation about the funding ratio because it seems premature. This whole process has been entirely too politicized. The highest criteria that we should be looking at, and one that this current proposal has never met regarding the location of the station, is response times. This is a matter of life and limb; putting a station in Ompah is going to leave a gap and require more financial wrestling to try to build a new station in Sharbot Lake. I am not prepared to support that at this time. We need more up to date statistics on mapping, location and response times,” Gutowski said.

Councilor John McDougall (South Frontenac) concurred. “My concern is that the community originally was not involved in these discussions. Moving the Parham ambulance base is a real concern. I feel right now there is a lack of clarity on the issues and I would agree that there needs to be more discussion.”

Councilor Clayton made once last effort to keep the proposed plan alive.

“What we're looking at here is a 2500 square foot fire hall and a 1500 square foot ambulance base, with the cost of building the base being higher that of the hall. All we are asking for right now is a different funding model. If doing so is going to cause all sorts of grief and force us to go back to the table then we are willing go ahead with the 2/3, 1/3 ratio that has been put forth.”

Paul Charbonneau said that changing the size of the building would definitely change the funding ratio as well as a number of other issues.

At the end of the day the staff report on the matter was received for information.

At this point no date has been set for setting out a request for proposal for the project.

The matter will undoubtedly be discussed at North Frontenac Council on Monday (March 28). 

Detailed roads study presents options, but council blocks them all

The world of municipal politics is sometimes akin to driving on a poorly maintained gravel road. Progress is slowed by bumps and potholes, and sometimes the road washes out altogether.

The drive for a regional road system to cover all of the major arterial roads in Frontenac County under one financial umbrella, which was initiated by county staff a couple of years ago, seems to be akin to a washed out road after a meeting of county council last week.

A detailed 150-page study of the road rehabilitation needs throughout the county, which was undertaken by Andrew Grunda, associate director of Watson & Associates, was presented to council at their meeting on Wednesday, March 16.

The Watson report included a preliminary analysis of the regional roads life-cycle capital needs and the fiscal implications associated with moving towards a sustainable funding for those assets and proposed numerous options to the county to address their road issues.

In a nutshell the final goal was to look at the long term sustainable funding levels for the various road networks as well as at different fiscal models available to the county to ensure service delivery over a 30-year period (2010-2040).

The report proposed three options for what are to be considered regional roads. The options range from a network including only the 382 kilometres, to a second option that includes arterial roads as well, which would include 454 kilometres of road, and a third that includes other major roads, for a total length of 519 kilometres of road.

Andrew Grunda summed up the report’s findings this way:

“At this stage in using a life-cycle based needs assessment, the county’s financial data is telling us that there is a significant amount of capital for a regional roads network that requires immediate attention - somewhere in the neighborhood of $37-$42 million. Overall, when we look at the fiscal impacts we see that having a county funding option does provide a more standardized source of funding and a broader funding pool for those regional roads assets. In most cases, with the exception of South Frontenac, the county funding scenario provides for a mitigated funding implication for those municipalities, which will tend to do better under a county approach as opposed to a status quo. That approach also provides a pool for the immediate needs required in South Frontenac.”

Essentially, as South Frontenac faces up to the cost of rehabilitating Road 38 in the near to immediate future, a regional system would enable those costs to be shared across the county, but in the longer term as roads elsewhere in the county need major work, the relative bulk of South Frontenac's population will become a source of revenue for smaller municipalities, and ratepayers in South Frontenac will end up subsidizing road costs throughout the county.

The Watson report concluded that further work on the plan needs to be done, including an engineered assessment of current road conditions and asset management practices, as well as the possibility of extra funding that the system might access, which is not flowing to the townships for road construction currently.

This could include provincial grants and/or allocations of county gas tax revenues and some of the savings the county has received through the provincial upload of social service costs.

“The benefit of having a regional system is to tackle the affordability concerns of some of the smaller municipalities in the county and maintaining a consistent, stable funding source at the county level,” Gunda concluded.

Warden Gary Davison, who is also the Mayor of South Frontenac Township, spoke out against the entire plan.

“All of this information you have gathered comes from our own various departments from information that we already have in our data bases,” he said, “We in South Frontenac have a five-year roads plan and have also looked 10 years down the road. I'm not in favour of where this study is taking us and I think we need to take charge of our own information. I believe we know what the local needs are and I think that our public works managers want to do this on a local level. Yes, we need to leverage the county for gas tax but we have spent a lot of money on ICSP programs that don't necessarily address what the crux of the gas tax money that was sent down from Toronto was to do, which was to maintain roads and bridges.”

Later in the meeting, a resolution was put forth to reconstitute a working group to consider how the Watson report can be implemented.

Deputy Warden Janet Gutowski supported the motion.

“Roads and infrastructure is a huge problem and for us to stick our heads in the sand is not appropriate. We need to come up with a plan and tackle this issue in a collaborative manner.”

A number of the new county councilors expressed the need to take more time to first review the report before acting further on the report.

In a recorded vote of 5-3, Warden Davison, councilors Doyle, McDougall, Jones and Purdon voted no, and Councilors Gutwoski, Clayton, and Inglis voted yes.