Now

It is a critical year for County council. One that will surely define its four-year term. But more crucially, the choices council makes or declines to make this year will have a profound and lasting impact on those who live on the margins in Prince Edward County.

Council will be called upon to reshape local government to fit a shrinking contribution from the provincial government. Some estimates point to a cut of as much as $4 million in direct transfers from the province to the County this spring. Indirect provincial funding cuts to other agencies, including conservation authorities and land ambulance services, could make this funding chasm a few million dollars wider.

Councillors will be compelled to make some hard decisions. Their track record isn’t promising.

This term of council stumbled out of the gate badly last year. It was pushed into a rookie-year budget—hiring folks and buying gear we didn’t need and getting back into businesses it had exited (for good reason) less than a decade earlier. It agreed to an 8.6 per cent increase to the tax levy—the highest dollar increase in the history of this municipality.

Sadly, little of this extra cash was directed to alleviate the deep structural challenges we face, including the lack of affordable housing, a declining population and decaying infrastructure. Even on the margins council proved unable to do simple things such as disposing of the Picton Firehall, made surplus by the building of an expensive new fire station on the edge of town.

In February, it parted ways with its County manager. By the end of 2019, all five of the architects of a modern and accountable municipal bureaucracy in Prince Edward County—Merlin Dewing, Susan Turnbull, James Hepburn, Robert McAuley, and Neil Carbone—had exited in one manner or another.

So, 2020 is a new beginning of sorts. A chance to start again. What council chooses to do—and not do—in the next weeks and months will signal whether it understands the challenges that confront this community.

Council starts the new decade with a bit of a tailwind.

Marcia Wallace brings an impressive resume and credentials to the job of County manager. She is, however, untested at this level of government— specifically a single-tier municipality with a broad swath of responsibilities, a small and shrinking population that is scattered over 1,000 kilometres of roads.

Council, led by Andreas Bolik, has tasked the bureaucracy to find 10 per cent savings in its operational budget. More important than the actual savings this exercise produces, is the fact that council may be learning to use its voice and influence to confront the municipality’s mounting challenges.

Here are some areas it may choose to wield this influence.

1. Reduce barriers to new homebuilding. More than anything else, Prince Edward County needs more homes. Of all shapes and sizes. More homes mean more people, more taxpayers, more waterworks consumers and more library users. More homebuilding means more opportunities to press for more affordable housing stock.

Council has a list of 32 recommendations developed and approved in 2017. The most important of these have not yet been adopted. This is an important first step. A committee of council should be established early in the new year tasked with making sure Prince Edward County is a competitive and attractive place to build new homes. The County has been predicted to be on the verge of a new homebuilding boom for 15 years. This year it must be realized.

2. Council and its senior managers must have an honest talk about roads. We can’t afford them. They are crumbling faster than we can repair them. The County lacks the money, the borrowing capacity and the taxing ability to fundamentally alter this fact. Yet every new term of council declares, with a straight face, that financial sustainability is its top priority. It is absurd.

It is long past time that Shire Hall admits that it doesn’t have the ability to fix its roads, bridges and other infrastructure on its own. There are just too many kilometres of roads, too many bridges and too few taxpayers. It doesn’t add up. One day council will need to be truthful about this with residents. Only then might we have an honest discussion about our choices. And what financial sustainability means.

3. Break up the Committee of the Whole (CoW). The experiment with the CoW has been a failure of democracy in Prince Edward County. Adopted a decade ago as a means to reduce duplication of debate between standing committees and council level, it was always a heavyhanded and wrong-headed remedy. Twice-monthly agendas regularly land with several hundreds of pages on council members’ desks. Detail is muted and public voices are marginalized.

Returning to a form of standing committee will signal a willingness to engage residents more directly and thus assist local government to cling to relevance in an age in which the value of liberal democracy is waning.

4. Council must assert its leadership in 2020. Nothing important will happen unless council makes it happen. There will be compelling arguments to tinker around the edges and to defer action, hoping and wishing our challenges fix themselves. But failing to change the County’s trajectory in terms of democratic accessibility, honesty and accountability in 2020 risks a continuing drift toward a shrinking enclave populated by wealthy folks.

Prince Edward County remains a beacon. A vibrant economy. Legions of folks with skills and the willingness to help. We are surrounded by natural beauty and a warm and welcoming community. But our community is built on a fragile and eroding foundation. By our inaction, we are changing the fundamental character of this place. By failing to accommodate new arrivals with new housing stock, we are displacing folks who were born here. Lived here. With them go their stories. Their traditions. Their hopes. And our ambitions for an affordable place to call home.

Leadership requires bold action in 2020.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca