Meaford’s council will be busy as we head into February. With a second attempt to develop a municipal budget for 2025 now underway, councillors will be busy scouring the new budget documents in hopes of finding opportunities for cost savings in order to shape a budget that will both meet the needs of the municipality and the pocketbooks of Meaford’s ratepayers.
While developing the municipal budgets for the coming year is an important time-consuming task, council also has some other issues to deal with, including the recruitment of a new CAO. Now they are also on the hunt for a new Fire Chief after the departure of Chief Courtney Allen, who, after four years with the Municipality of Meaford, is moving on to take the Fire Chief position in King Township beginning February 1.
During Monday’s council meeting, councillors approved the appointments of an interim CAO (Treasurer Valerie Manning), as well as an interim Fire Chief (Rob Pilon) who will undertake the duties of those positions until replacements are recruited and hired.
The departure of the Fire Chief comes just two months after CAO Kymm Buckham’s departure in late November, after just six months at the helm of the municipality.
As I reported in our July 4, 2024 newspaper, the now former Fire Chief was the spouse of the now former CAO, a fact that raised the eyebrows of some last summer when the new CAO was hired by council.
One of the many reasons that the municipal hiring policy specifically states that no relative of an existing municipal employee should be hired if there is any line of supervision in either direction (and of course the CAO is ultimately the boss of all departments), is that if one departs from their employment with the municipality, the relative, in this case a spouse, could very likely follow suit, which can certainly cause frustration for any municipality.
Many of us are sad to see the Fire Chief go, as he had been a great asset to the fire department and the municipality during his four years here, but he has now moved on, and so must council and the municipality.
As we head into what will most certainly be another challenging year, this municipality will need to have the best people possible in the top positions in the municipality. Meaford currently has an interim CAO, an acting Clerk, and an interim Fire Chief, but hopefully it won’t be too long before this municipality finds permanent (as permanent as any position is in the world of municipal governance) replacements for those positions, along with a number of others that are currently vacant.
As I wrote back in November, “it is never good for a municipality when a member of senior management departs, particularly a CAO to whom all other municipal staff ultimately report. Such a departure creates upheaval, confusion, and often frustration as projects and initiatives can be delayed in the absence of a CAO. The absence of a CAO (and now a Fire Chief), and the need to fill the position, is also a distraction for council who now have to add recruiting and hiring a CAO to their 2025 to-do list, something I’m sure they would all prefer to not have to do.”
The most pressing issue at the moment for council is of course completing the 2025 budget process, but once that is done, the challenges continue to mount for our council.
The 2025 budget aside, there are many important issues facing this municipality, from the pumped storage proposal to the massively expensive, but ultimately necessary (or is it?), expansion of our wastewater treatment plant, not to mention council’s desire to implement a regulatory system for short term accommodations in this municipality, a major undertaking itself. With these and other major issues like the continued increase in development proposals facing this municipality it will be important for council, and for the ratepayers that councillors represent, to fill the CAO position as quickly as possible.
Just the wastewater treatment plant expansion would be enough to keep councillors awake at night. With a current estimate of more than $120 million, it would be a financial burden on the municipality for decades to come, so much so that at Monday’s council meeting, Councillor Steve Bartley suggested that he was on the verge of bringing forward a motion to halt all future development in the urban area of the municipality as $120 million is simply too much for a small municipality to grapple with. Bartley said however that he is holding off on bringing forward such a motion after speaking with provincial leaders at the recent ROMA (Rural Ontario Municipal Association) conference earlier this month, who gave him some hope that assistance from upper levels of government could be on the way.
The challenges are many, and we have elected these seven members of council to face those challenges on our behalf, but it won’t be easy – municipal governance rarely is. With an early provincial election now in our near future, along with a pending federal election, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year provincially and federally, and those elections can of course impact small town councils like Meaford’s.
2025 is also the last full year of this term of council, with the next municipal election to be held on October 26 of 2026, so with a long list of council priorities that have yet to be achieved, the year to come looks to be a busy one indeed.
As I have written before, I do not envy the seven councillors who represent the residents of this municipality. The challenges can be daunting, and there can often be surprises along the way. This council has its work cut out for it in the months to come with a laundry list of major issues to face, any of which would be significant hurdles to clear on their own, so strap in, as we have a long and potentially bumpy road ahead.
