County CAO shoots down alternative policing options

Jeff Green | Aug 12, 2015

In response to a request from North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins, Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Pender has produced a report into alternatives to OPP policing for Frontenac municipalities.

At the end of his 15-page report, Pender recommended not spending any more time or money looking into the matter.

“Our recommendation is that this report be received without further action …” reads the concluding sentence.

He said earlier in the report that Council could consider sending an “Expression of Interest” to both the City of Kingston and City of Ottawa police forces to see if either or both are interested in bidding on the service. However, he also advised that if either of them were interested, the County would need to conduct a study to look at all factors related to changing from the OPP to a neighboring municipal force.

That study would cost in the order of $20,000 in Pender's estimation, based on how much the City of Perth spent when they conducted a similar analysis in 2013, and Pender does not see any real benefit to spending that kind of money. All the information he was able to gather indicates that the cost of policing would go up substantially under a municipal force.

After conducting their own analysis, the City of Perth disbanded their own force and opted for a policing contract with the OPP, which brought savings to Perth in the order of $900,000 per year.

Pender also pointed out that municipal forces can only expand their service footprint in a contiguous manner, so in order for North Frontenac, for example, to make use of City of Kingston policing, both Central and South Frontenac would need to do the same,

Earlier in the report, Pender dismissed the idea of establishing an independent Frontenac County Police Force. “…There are significant barriers to entry,” he wrote, “including facilities, vehicles/equipment and communications. No attempt has been made to quantify those costs. Given start-up costs, the option to have a 'Frontenac Police Service' is not likely to be feasible.”

Pender concludes that the best option for Frontenac County is to work through the Association of Municipalities of Ontario to “influence the reform of policing of Ontario in order to address increased costs to rural municipalities such as the four Frontenac Townships.

The context for Pender's look at this issue is a significant increase in policing costs in all four townships that came from a provincially mandated change in municipal funding for the OPP.

The new system was designed to make the funding system clear, when it had been anything but beforehand. It has resulted in large increases for rural and remote townships and decreases for towns such as Perth, Gananoque, and Smiths Falls.

The system is being phased in until 2019, by which time all Frontenac Townships will have seen major increases. The total bill for Frontenac ratepayers will have risen from $3.7 million in 2014, the year before the phase in, to $5.6 million, an increase of almost almost 50%. The raise in North Frontenac is the most dramatic, from $227,976 in 2014 to $845,817 in 2019.

Even then, North Frontenac ratepayers will be paying the lowest per household among Frontenac municipalities, at $203 per household. Central and South Frontenac ratepayers will both be paying around $300 per household at that time.

One of the issues of concern to North Frontenac is the fact that the new funding model considers all households in the same manner, not accounting for the fact that the majority of households in North Frontenac are seasonal residents, who are also paying policing costs where they reside for most of the year, and for the most part only require policing in North Frontenac in the summer months.

Recently the Frontenac OPP, which is housed in Hartington, took over responsibility for the Sharbot Lake detachment, which serves Central and North Frontenac. Historically, Sharbot Lake had been a satellite of the Lanark Detachment.