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Myths and misses
Mayor Ferguson spent his final weeks in office with a finger hovering over the strong mayor button. Whether he pressed it mattered less than the questions behind it: Why did he think he needed it? And why did his story keep changing? Who was he serving?
(In the end, the mayor chose not to push the button, announcing on Tuesday he would allow the next Council to make its own decisions.)
For more than six years, County residents were fed a revolving wheel of lies, made-up facts and false urgency. A doubling of the County’s population. One million square feet of commercial development in Wellington. Bad water in Picton. The province will be angry.
It seemed the mayor and former Shire Hall leadership spent their days throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what would stick. But for whom was this meal intended?
Residents weren’t buying it. Several hundred folks filled the hall in Wellington in 2024 to tell them so. It made no difference. Mayor Ferguson, the then-CAO and a clutch of council members pushed forward. Because growth. Because developers. Because they had cracked the code—they had figured out how to get free infrastructure. All we had to do was spend $300 million first.
A year earlier, Mayor Ferguson and the then Shire Hall leadership took out a full-page ad in the Times and elsewhere to dispel myths they felt had contaminated the public conversation that summer.
According to the advertisement, not only were fears of rising rates unfounded, but if residents would just listen, there would be oodles of cost savings from infrastructure spending in Wellington that would flow through as lower rates for everyone. It was presented as fact. It is impossible to know if they ever believed their own nonsense. Or whether they believed residents would accept it—because Shire Hall said it was so.
In any event, three years later, the key component, the pipes under the Millennium Trail, are more than a year late and many millions over budget. It is clear there are no cost savings coming to ratepayers. Facts aren’t what they used to be.
But it went on. The ad claimed Shire Hall’s population growth projections were realistic. Its experts said so. Since then, its experts have categorically disowned the forecasts Shire Hall made up to support its regional water plan. It was another story—fabricated out of thin air to support spending millions of dollars we don’t have.
It gets better. In the summer of 2023, Shire Hall was confident that Kaitlin was chomping at the bit to get building homes in Wellington. This myth they created themselves: The developer was stringing them along, and they believed him when he said they were the problem. Tender the pipes and the pumping station, he promised, and the houses would follow.
Three summers have come and gone since then. The fields north of the village have appreciated nicely for the developer, with shiny new pipes running alongside its land. But Kaitlin is no closer to building new homes in Wellington than it was three years ago.
One more myth: urgency. Shire Hall had to spend fast and build fast, they said, to squeeze 75 per cent of the cost out of developers; that it had to spend money fast so it could “take advantage” of developers.
It is laughable now to think the mayor and the former CAO believed they had hatched a scheme to separate developers from their hard-earned dollars. It was always a rigged game. Indeed, the developer managed to extract $50 million for new waterworks from the municipality, enhancing its land value in Wellington, and winning control over homebuilding in the village for the foreseeable future. The developer was always going to win. And it did.
Every fact that Shire Hall used to support unbridled waterworks spending in that 2023 ad has dissolved when it met the real world.
But in its wake, the last six years of spin has shaken residents’ view of local government to its core. You hear it in the questions at candidate meetings. On the street. In the grocery store.
Shire Hall’s reputation has taken a beating. It will take years to repair. An election will help. The institution needs radical renewal. It needs new folks to step up and to ask questions about how such bad ideas were allowed to take root and fester for so long.
Municipal governments don’t often hold inquiries to learn what went wrong. Perhaps we might make an exception.
The next council must put distance between itself and the methods of the last term. It must prioritize residents over developers. It must start with a clean slate—unencumbered by the lies and false urgency peddled to residents over the past six years.
One day we may learn the truth. But not today. Maybe not for a while.
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