By Stephen Vance, Editor
I drove out to Sydenham this week and went for a little walk. The issue of Sydenham residents who have been expressing displeasure with the 12 year old marriage to the former Town of Meaford and the former Township of St. Vincent was weighing heavily on my mind.
I love the Sydenham area, I love the rolling hills, the vast agricultural fields, the forested trails, and most of all, in the eight years I’ve lived in Meaford, I’ve met many wonderful residents in Sydenham.
As much as I am fond of the entire Municipality of Meaford, if I lived in Sydenham, I would want to separate too.
Not because there is anything wrong with Meaford – I think Meaford is a very special place to live – and not because folks in the urban part of Meaford – where I happen to live – are evil, but quite simply because the Meaford-Sydenham union is not the right fit.
If you stand on any concession road in Sydenham and look around, you feel very disconnected from Meaford. You know Meaford is there, but it isn’t relevant to your everyday life, or the lifestyle you have chosen to live in a place like Sydenham.
Those who choose to live in a rural area like Sydenham, do so knowing that they sacrifice many of the services and facilities afforded to urban-dwellers, and they are fine with that. In exchange, rural residents have traditionally expected – and rightly so – lower property taxes than those living in urban centres.
And there lies the real issue – property taxes.
After amalgamating with Meaford in 2001, Sydenham residents were suddenly supporting a host of urban services with their property tax dollars, and that hasn’t sat well with Sydenham ratepayers from the beginning – and how could anyone really expect Sydenham residents to be pleased with paying for swimming pools, arts and culture centres, streetlights, libraries, and a laundry list of other services that they don’t use, and perhaps more importantly, don’t need?
At the two public meetings this week in Woodford and Bognor, it was said over and over again – “all we need is road maintenance, garbage collection, and police and fire protection.”
Whether Meaford’s councils in recent years have spent taxpayer’s money responsibly, whether a small municipality like Meaford should have high priced staff like a CAO, or whether Meaford really needs an Economic Development Manager, are really side issues. The crux of the issue is that rural residents don’t see the need to be paying for those things out of their own pockets.
Perhaps Sydenham residents wouldn’t be so resentful of a portion of their tax dollars going to such services if they felt that their own community was being well maintained with the rest of their tax dollars. Instead, the roads in Sydenham are quite simply an embarrassment – in spite of the fact that more money has been spent on Sydenham roads in recent years than has been spent on urban roads.
At the two public meetings this week, much was made of the drastic increase in municipal tax collection today compared to in 2006. Admittedly it is staggering when you see a near doubling of tax dollars this year when compared to seven years ago, but even that isn’t all the fault of the municipality or council. In 2006 we were paying roughly 80 cents per litre for fuel, and today we’re paying $1.30. All those big trucks that plow our roads use a lot of fuel, so you would expect that with fuel prices having increased by more than 50 percent in those seven years, budgets for the roads department -one of the more costly departments to begin with – would also increase. Electricity rates have also skyrocketed in the last seven years, and that impacts every department of the municipality, which again puts a strain on a municipal budget.
So those pressures, along with the municipality finding itself with an accumulated deficit of nearly $3 million a few years ago have resulted in some steep increases in property taxes in the last few years, but what undoubtedly sticks in the craw of Sydenham residents, and in fact many residents throughout the municipality, is that during this tough economic time for the municipality, not a single meaningful dollar has been cut from municipal budgets, which has meant that the ratepayers in Meaford have carried the entire burden of fixing Meaford’s financial woes on their tax bills.
I can’t blame Sydenham residents for being outraged, but the reality is that it is extremely unlikely that the residents of Sydenham who are seeking a divorce will succeed. De-amalgamation is a complex, costly, and lengthy process with little chance of success. Even if they are successful, an actual separation is likely to be years away, and what Meaford’s council should be doing now, is making every attempt to repair the fractured relationship with Sydenham, and they should be open to having meaningful debates and finding solutions to the problems that have been building since amalgamation.
Like it or not, Meaford, St. Vincent, and Sydenham are part of one municipality, and with restructuring unlikely, we all need to find a way to make it work.
