Renewal
What does a school board do? There was a day not too long ago when the local board helped shape the curriculum— the information and materials actually taught in the classroom. No longer. Today, the curriculum is developed, stamped and syndicated centrally in the Ministry of Education in Toronto. There was also a day when […]
Accentuate the positive
Housing Corp chair reports to council Everything is going great at the County’s Affordable Housing Corp., according to its chair, Councillor Phil St-Jean. In his report to his council colleagues last week, St- Jean laid out a timetable in which a proposed eight-unit apartment block will begin construction next month and be ready to accept […]
Stand up
It doesn’t change anything. It was always an impossibility that 12,000 County taxpayers were expected to maintain the 1,047 kilometres of roads that criss-cross this place. It remains a futile job description. Beyond our capability. It is especially so for County roads 49 and 33 (Loyalist Parkway). These roads should never have been downloaded onto […]
Failure to communicate
Two dozen folks came to Shire Hall last week—worried about the impact of construction on Main Street in Bloomfield this year. (See story here). In a pair of project information centre (PIC) sessions held in the village earlier this year, residents and business owners were presented with three options to consider—as if their opinion mattered […]
Choices
Spring is a joyous time. A time of rebirth. Of surviving another cold, hard winter spent clinging desperately to the shores of Lake Ontario as snowbombs give way to blizzards, joined by long bouts of punishingly cold temperatures. But the rapture of an emerging spring is always short-lived in this place—quickly subsumed by the dread […]
Into temptation
Municipal politicians must roll over at night and cry out for a divine hand to shield them from the howling press. From the grievance seekers. From the second-guessers. The backseat drivers. The allure must always be there. The gnawing desire to debate municipal business behind closed doors is surely ever-present. Life would be much easier […]
Start fresh
The County made a deal. In 2008, Shire Hall reached a settlement with the Waring’s Creek Improvement Association in which it agreed to study the sensitive watershed serving this waterway. It didn’t happen. The County reneged on its deal. Time and lawyerly interpretations have eroded the municipality’s strict legal responsibility, yet a powerful moral responsibility […]
Ticket to ride
In the department of things-the-municipality- ought-not-be-doing, the latest candidate must surely be County Transit. It is a layer of municipal bureaucracy, that, despite its name, doesn’t actually deliver transit services. In fact, Quinte Transit provides transit services in Prince Edward County. It owns, operates, licenses, maintains, and eventually disposes of all buses used in the […]
Breaking point
How doth the little crocodile How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! C.S. Lewis—an adaptation of the poem from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The folks who live at the Legion Manor in Wellington have had a front row seat to the pointlessness of the County’s feeble affordable housing […]
What Covid wrought
Steve Ferguson is a good man, surely guided by good intentions. Somewhere along the way, he came to believe he might be a transformational leader. One who would guide County residents to a bigger, better, brighter future. But Prince Edward County wasn’t changing. Not in the way he and others imagined. It was what it […]