Dear Editor,
Two things. First, I want to commend to every voter your excellent Rant on the inside back cover of your October 1st edition (The 3Rs…Rants, Raves & Rumours, October 1 print edition). In this piece you clarify a number of important things, including that unless one is observing council closely and with a full understanding of its processes, it is possible to form conclusions that are, in fact, baseless.
You separated fact from fiction:
“The pre-development agreement offers the municipality $3.24 million dollars of discretionary funding over the next three years whether or not the pumped storage project ultimately moves forward. The agreement is not contingent upon support for the proposal, and it doesn’t bind the next term of council to any form of support for the project. If the next council doesn’t want the pre-development funding, they will be able to tear up the agreement, move a motion to rescind the conditional support for the project approved by council in February of 2023, and let the chips fall where they may, likely throwing a huge wrench into future talks regarding a community benefit agreement…”
“The pre-development agreement provides funding to the municipality from TC Energy, largely in recognition of the impacts of having this proposal looming over our municipality for the past eight years, for the next three years before any of us know if the project will ever be realized. It is essentially free money for our eight-year (thus far) inconvenience. All of that said, should the next term of council opt to back out of the agreement, and if the next council decides to vote to rescind the conditional support for the project approved by this current council in February 2023, if the project is ultimately given the green light to move forward, good luck negotiating anything with TC Energy that would benefit this municipality.”
Secondly, with respect to Mr. Clair Balfour’s Letter to the Editor in the October 8th edition of the Meaford Independent, and with all due respect, your council has had a number of legal opinions on the municipality’s control over the pumped storage project. None of them believed that, because what is now Army Training Centre – Central is within the Municipality of Meaford, we are in a position to stop it. All the varied legal advice we have received over a number of years has been to provide conditional support and to tie the conditions to our environmental and socio-economic impact concerns as well as successful negotiation of a community benefit agreement.
Ross Kentner
Mayor, Municipality of Meaford
