Editorial: Are North and Central Frontenac viable anymore?

Jeff Green | Apr 05, 2012

Editorial by Jeff Green

North Frontenac Township needed $600,000 more from its ratepayers in 2012. Central Frontenac needed $225,000, and South Frontenac over $1.2 million more. All told, the three townships will be collecting about $22 million to run their local operations.

At the same time all three townships have seen decreases in their reserve funds year after year.

The major cost facing local municipalities is roads and bridges, and the reason that both North and South Frontenac put up local taxes in 2012 was to finance multi-year road paving programs that are aimed at maintaining roads at current levels over the long term. Central Frontenac kept their increase to a minimum by not embarking on a road re-paving program, but sooner or later they will have to, and the budget will go up accordingly.

There is not much that anyone can do about this. Much of the road costs come from roads that were once provincially maintained. This point was made by the mayor and CAO of South Frontenac Township to the provincial Ministry of Transportation at a meeting during the annual ROMA/Good Roads Conference in Toronto in February. The gulf between municipal resources and the costs of maintaining arterial roads and bridges has been the pre-occupation of the Eastern Ontario Warden’s Caucus and was the subject of a recent study and report that they sponsored.

It is clear, at least in the medium term, that the federal and provincial governments are concerned about reducing their own fiscal deficits right now. Roads and bridge money for municipalities is not coming for the next five years.

Frontenac County has been floating the idea of a regional roads system, of some way of pooling resources to do more road work in the county at a lower cost, but these efforts have been re-buffed by the townships.

There are a number of reasons for this, one being the fact that the county has no expertise in road construction or maintenance, as it has no roads department. A second has to do with lingering resentment over the fact that while municipalities across Ontario have been using gas tax rebate funds from the federal government to finance road and bridge projects for the past five years, Frontenac County has been banking their share of the funds and financing sustainability projects with the money, against the desires of local councils.

The township councils believe, and they may indeed be right, that entering into a relationship with Frontenac County over roads will only lead to more bureaucracy and less available money for actual roadwork.

One thing that has not been looked at, and particularly in the case of North and Central Frontenac, it might be relevant, is the fact that for a combined permanent resident population of about 6,500 people, the two townships each have a full-fledged administrative structure.

There are two CAOs, two IT managers, two planning co-ordinators, two treasurers, two assistant treasurers, and the list goes on.

I am fully aware that the history of amalgamation is one of promised administrative savings vanishing into thin air and leading ultimately to increased costs.

However, it will certainly have to occur to someone that the current scenario will only lead to higher taxes and a lessening ability to maintain services over time.

With current technology there must be a way to run all the services offered by North and Central Frontenac out of one office, and there must be a way to make it cheaper than running two almost identical offices in Plevna and Sharbot Lake.

If this idea is ever going to be discussed seriously - and to be honest I don’t think it will be - there would be a concern about cohesion in a “mega-township”. To that I would say two things. Firstly, 6,500 full-time residents is not exactly mega, and secondly, there is already a lack of cohesion in both North and Central Frontenac. In each case the "wild westerners", former Kennebec residents in Central Frontenac and Barrie residents in North Frontenac, feel they are on the outside looking in as far as their township council is concerned.

In a single township (let’s hypothetically name it "North Frontenac" to save on stationary costs), it wouldn’t be that different.

With 6,500 permanent residents, and the cash cow of almost 13,000 seasonal residents, if done right, "North Frontenac" would have be able to put a bit more money on the roads than the combined North and Central Frontenac townships do now.