Questions, Six of 'Em

I wasn't sure what to make of the media request that came to my town email box last week, but I decided to play along.  

Here's what was asked, and below, how I responded.

 

The next municipal election is just one year away: Oct. 24, 2022. With that in mind, with just one year left on your mandate, we have some questions for you. We will run your answers in CollingwoodToday.ca verbatim. 

One caveat: each answer for each question cannot be more than 150 words. 

Please return answers to me by the end of day Oct. 25.

1. What do you think is this council's biggest accomplishment this year? Be specific.

 

Thanks for the opportunity to review 23 pages of votes taken since January! We are doing hard and time-consuming work to bring back trust by implementing the governance and accountability recommendations from the Judicial Inquiry. It is vitally important the Affordable Housing Task Force comes up with concrete plans to help with the current crisis. We prevented another summer of difficulties at Sunset Point with reasonable rules to accommodate visitors and locals. I’m ecstatic with the rainbow crosswalk, and that Collingwood’s hate symbols resolution was supported by more than 2000 Canadian municipalities. The town helped the hockey league change its name and symbols to be more inclusive, and we are honouring a town Manager whose death on the job is possibly connected to systemic racism.These actions show we are moving forward, and while progress is too slow for some and too fast for others, it is happening.                      

2. What is the biggest challenge facing town council in its final year?

Recovering from the pandemic. Some projects are a year behind schedule, and we’re just starting to see the implications of supply chain issues that are an echo of the first waves. While we continue to regain public trust following the events that led to the Inquiry, we also have to focus on managing growth mandated by the Province and allocated by the County to keep the quality of life that draws so many people here; things like that Collingwood is safe, walkable, welcoming and inclusive.

3. Are there any decisions you've made so far this term that you regret or matters that, in hindsight, you might have approached differently?

Early on, I was challenged on how I had voted on a particular item, and I could not articulate why. I learned from that humbling experience that not only should a councillor closely read the provided reports and think about them, then listen to any argument with an open mind, but, before any vote, be sure we’re getting all the information, and correct information, to be clear and confident we are doing the right thing for the community. I aim for that standard every time I raise my ‘yes’ or ‘no’ card. 

4. What has been your greatest learning experience from governing during a pandemic?

I have learned that people will find a way to get done what needs to be done. For example, I belong to a volunteer group that is working to attract and train more women candidates for municipal office in Grey and Bruce Counties.  (Shameless plug: here’s the website: electhernow.ca  we have an event early next month!) It started with about a dozen of us, some elected, some not. We have -still- never met in person, but we have found a way to reach out and teach, network, plan, help, and advise (and hopefully change the world).

5. What do you feel will be this term of council's most enduring legacy?

That’s not up to me to decide and it’s too early to say. We may have made decisions with unintended consequences that we cannot fathom yet. We’re certainly dealing with the unintended consequences of previous councils’ decisions. What would be an excellent legacy is implementing the recommendations about accountability and open decision-making from the Judicial Inquiry and working with the province so other municipalities don’t find themselves in the same dire straits. Another excellent legacy would be preventing unreasonable tax increases and providing a safe and livable place for all sorts of people. 

6. Do you intend to run again? Why or why not?

It is an honour to serve and I’m grateful for the opportunities that come with this work, but let’s not be distracted from the important year ahead. This is serious stuff: the town is a 100-million dollar corporation allocating taxes levied from the people it serves, and Councillors are its Board of Directors. 

Media plays a vital role in a democracy, even more than I understood while working in it. I urge your publication to take your responsibility seriously and refrain from printing comments, praise, or attacks on council decisions without identifying when Letters to the Editor etc., come from people affiliated with Municipal or other campaigns, past or present. It can be misleading to provide commentary from current or former CFOs or Campaign Managers without disclosure of such connections, as has been happening recently. 

These questions have given me the opportunity to clarify my thoughts. Thanks.

Your Property Taxes versus Your Property Value

I got an email last week from a person who's concerned about their property taxes and what happens now that many of us are suddenly living in houses worth approaching a million dollars. Houses we sure did not pay a million dollars for! 

If your house is now valued at a million dollars, but currently assessed at 300,000, does that mean you're suddenly going to have to pay three times as much in property taxes? 

 

Happily, no.

 

I thought maybe the person who wrote me isn't the only one with this specific concern, so here's what I wrote back (and I checked it with the Treasurer, so it's legit): 

 

I can guarantee you, you’re not going to have a doubled tax bill if your house is suddenly worth twice as much. Property taxes work very differently than sales tax or income tax. 

Here’s how Collingwood’s budget process worked the last two years that I’ve been on Council: The Treasurer and other staff come to council with a rough number of how many dollars the town needs if we’re going to continue offering all the services we currently have. Then, we councillors send the staff away with another rough number: what we’re willing to accept as an increase or decrease in spending. After that, staff return with a proposed budget, which incorporates Council’s number and any new or additional services the council has told them the town needs or wants. We debate and discuss, cut some stuff, keep some other stuff and then, that’s the budget, and the tax rate flows from there.

Last year, the final number of dollars needed came to around 30 million raised from property taxes. Here’s the important part: The approximately 30-million is then collected from among all the taxpayers, based proportionally on their MPAC assessment. 

(Just fyi, the town’s whole budget is actually about 100-million dollars, but the rest comes from other sources, like the feds and province and interest and fees and Development Charges.)

(To add another complication, the town collects your taxes on behalf of the County and the School Board, so, if your tax bill is 5,000 dollars, only about 2900 comes to the town. The County and the School Board set their own taxation rate, which the town has no say in. This year, the County has set a target of 2% for its increase. The school board is likely to have a small decrease. (I may have already heard what was in their budget, but I can’t remember offhand…))

Collingwood taxpayers have seen lower than cost-of-living property tax increases the last several years (about 1%), because of how many new people are moving here. The Treasurer can’t know exactly how many new properties will start getting tax bills each year, because of delays in construction etc., but the Treasurer does come up with an estimate, with help from the building and planning departments, and includes that estimate in the total number of dollars to be collected. Some years, the estimates are a might bit conservative, and we end up with a surplus that we put, by policy, into reserves. Some people don’t like this policy. 

Wow, that was a really long answer to your question, which was, ‘has there been any thought put into this?’, and the shorter answer is a definite, ‘yes’.  Lots of thought, for sure. You can rest assured your property taxes will not double even if your house price doubles, because everyone else’s house price is also going up, and the property taxes are based on the town’s needs, divided among all the taxpayers, proportionate to the value of their property.

 

So, if you, like me, are planning to leave your house 'feet first', I hope this clarification helps ease your mind a little. Oh, and a further clarification: the town does actually have a say in the County's taxes since we send two people to County Council: the Mayor and Deputy Mayor and sometimes me, since I'm the alternate. Also, the Treasurer tells me MPAC offers input for the estimates of new homes in town, while tax policy advisors hired by the county additionally give the town's Treasurer input on the estimates.

Water Triage

I read a document over the winter that scared the living daylights out of me. 

It’s the province’s Draft Triage Protocols for Covid 19. When there's a certain number of COVID patients in the ICUs, teams of doctors will make decisions about which newly arriving patients get care. If two doctors agree a patient has an 80% chance of being alive a year from now, they get the care. There are two other levels of triage involving whether a patient has a 50% or 35% chance of survival. When there are huge demands and limited resources, rationing is required and hard decisions have to be made, no matter how we got here or how awful it might seem.

We made one of those hard decisions last night at Collingwood Town Council. There are quite a few people who are disappointed in the vote to bring in an Interim Control Bylaw, and I don't blame them one bit. 

I’m disappointed, too, mostly that such a move was necessary. But I believe it was necessary and that’s why I voted for it, even while feeling nauseated and frustrated and appalled. Hopefully, the communications from town hall on this issue will lead to a better understanding for everybody.

The hard fact is, we don't currently have enough water to supply all the development 'on the books'  between now and when we fill the tanks at a new water treatment facility. 

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, we didn’t find out until early this year that during the winter months, Collingwood's water treatment plant can only make around 20,000 cubic litres of clean water per day. In summer, the plant can provide more than 31,000 litres. Cold water doesn’t take up chlorine the way warm water does and there were warnings about it in staff reports in previous years, but it wasn’t until very recently that this new calculation was completed and verified by the Ministry of the Environment. We knew capacity was less in cold weather, but we didn't know by how much. Now we know.

It's a new number. It's new news. I repeat: it’s a new number. 

There’s been talk of replacing the water treatment plant for a long, long time, but it just didn’t get built for ... reasons. There were even designs made and approved, but not built.

One of the very first council votes I was part of, in January of 2019, was to go ahead with the first steps -again- toward building a new water treatment plant. There were concerns about capacity articulated at the time, but we definitely thought we were on track to continue meeting all water needs until the new plant would open, sometime in 2025. It was going to be close, but there was a dovetail imagined where the number of new homes and businesses would grow, and, just in time, we would have that new plant ready. 

This new calculation means we’re about four years off. If all goes well, we -maybe- can squeeze out enough water supply for a total of 1048 new homes and businesses in the interim, but only in the best case scenario, which is if we cut some of the supply to New Tecumseth and use extra chlorine in the winter. We can get more if we build an add-on tank to treat extra water, but that's going to take about two years to install.

I voted to make the best of a terrible, horrible, no-good, really bad situation. If we can supply only 1048 units before the plant comes online, I want us to be thoughtful and deliberate. I want us to make choices in the best interest of the community rather than letting the chips fall where they may, since the way planning works, water allocation is first-come, first served. 

The only way to definitively take control of the hoped-for additional water supply is to bring in an Interim Control Bylaw. You’ll notice the first word is INTERIM. Short term. Plans and proposals can still come to town hall and go through the planning process. The ICBL is the only instrument we have, though, to prevent the final step, a building permit, because the rules say we can’t give a building permit without water to service the build. 

I got accused this morning of taking the ‘easy way out’. Well, there was no ‘easy way’ here that I could see. It's easy to say we could just turn off the water to New Tech and keep all our supply. I somehow doubt it would be easy to cut off the water to the family in Alliston whose sink and bathtub and washing machine use water from Collingwood.

It's easy to say we could just add more chlorine to the water. We’re allowed to have up to 4mg/l of chlorine in our water. It’s not easy to swallow that much chlorine, though, since it tastes and smells terrible. A higher level of chlorine is also not easy on the equipment at factories or your clothes. A higher level of chlorine is also not easy on the equipment at the current water plant or the workers who are putting it in the water. 

It would have been easiest if we'd built a new water plant several years ago. I love this idea! I wish earlier councils had built a new plant. I also wish all the repeated rounds of negotiation with New Tech had been fruitful. I wish someone had done this calculation sooner. I wish we weren’t in this pickle. As my dear departed dad used to say, “If wishes were fishes, we’d have lots to eat.”

What happens now? Well, among other things and in no particular order:

• You can continue to trust the safety of Collingwood's water.
• The projects that have building permits in hand will go ahead. 
• Projects that don't yet have building permits will continue the process up until the final steps.
  
• Some people will not get to move here when they were expecting to, which will make some people happy and some people angry.
  
• House prices will rise, which will make some people happy and other people angry.
  
• People will still renovate, including bathrooms, decks and additions. 
• You will fill your pool if you have one, otherwise, you will join me in the lake.
  
• We will put out a request for proposals in the next couple of weeks for a new water plant, and build it as soon as possible. 
• We will add a little more chlorine to our water sometimes.
  
• We will try to take back some of the supply to New Tecumseth and Blue Mountain. 
• We will install a separate tank to treat some more water. 
• We will start a process to decide which projects get the scarce water we can supply, (the maybe1048 and possibly more)
• We'll be asking for your help making the list mentioned above. (Should affordable/attainable housing projects be at the top of it? Maybe start thinking about that.)
  
• We’ll continue work on our Official Plan, making decisions on what kind of town we want to be. 

I sure hope the weather is nice for the ribbon cutting on the replacement water plant, and I truly hope no one has to wear a mask to the ceremony.

 

What We’ve Done

A few months ago, I was invited to speak to a community group about my work on the Town Council in Collingwood. I saw it as an opportunity not only to gather my thoughts about the last many months, but also as a chance to learn PowerPoint, since the meeting would have to be held virtually because... Covid.

I was grateful for a chance to learn and a chance to reflect, and boy, has there been time for both in the last while, because...Covid. I went through the copious notes I take before and during meetings, and I had to go through some minutes and agendas, too, because, I have discovered, my note-taking is copious, but not always, um, legible.

We have made quite a few decisions I'm proud of. I think we've kept our tax rates reasonable, and that saying yes to a hockey team and to cannibis retailers were good choices. It was also a good choice to put money into helping the people who have been sleeping in our parks.

When Covid hit, we moved quickly to close down our facilities for safety's sake, and deferred tax payments for people who needed that break while they sorted things out. We brought in a somewhat nuanced approach to our overcrowded parks that will be tweaked in the next few months, since it appears Covid will not be cured before next winter.

I'm proud of my council colleagues for joining me to stand up to the province when it made its wrong-headed decision to gut Conservation Authorities, even though the effort ultimately proved futile, as I'm sure at least some of my colleagues were aware it would.

I'm also proud of our response to the Black Lives Matter protests, and the increasing awareness of the need for a concerted response to expressions of hatred and division. The council was unanimous in calling for provincial and federal changes to hate speech laws, and we have created what is being called a 'Unity Collective', to make space for us all to learn more about systemic discrimination, privilege, and power. As I tend to when confronted with difficult topics, I started reading, and am now familiar with the work of James Baldwin, Ijeoma Oluo, Ibram X Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Carol Anderson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates in an attempt to become more aware of and responsive to these issues. Eight books is not enough to fully understand the fallout and fix the mistakes of the last 400 years, but it's a start.

We've approved a plan to build the long-awaited splash pad, put in some permanent washrooms at Fisher Field, and revamp the playground and pavillion at Sunset Point. We also finished fixing up Napier Street. Mountain Road is next, along with implementing the cycling plan and planting a thousand donated trees over the next five years. All that plus re-doing our Official Plan and our Strategic Plan.

Has it been perfect? Why, no. I think it's taking too long to make decisions on some items, like assigning the share sale proceeds and determining what to do with the terminals. But, as we discovered in the 900 pages of the Judicial Inquiry, when a town council rushes into a decision, it's not generally a good decision that's made. Speaking of which, I'd like to make some decisions in the next very very short while on what was contained in the blessed JI report. You can view what I had to say about it on my council facebook page.

As I put together the PowerPoint, I also realised how much I've learned about process and prodedure and how the whole 'municipal governance' thing works. I'm no expert yet, but I'm starting to understand my 'unknowns' and 'known unknowns', and there are fewer 'unknown unknowns' each day.

At the start of this new year, I'm hoping for peace and safety for our cousins and friends in the US and a quick vaccination schedule for Covid. In the meantime, I look forward to long walks with my doggie on the trails when they're not icy. When they are icy, we take to the sidewalks, where I continue to seek out 'flowerpot houses'. I hope you, too, are weathering the lockdown as well as possible under the circumstances.