If you had a to create a new municipality out of four distinct communities – and back in the late ‘90s that’s exactly what they had to do – there’s a case to be made the Town of Minto is at least a logical conglomeration.
The former towns of Harriston and Palmerston and the village of Clifford were bound together by the fertile farmland of Minto Township and the four communities shared, for the most part, a hospital, a high school and a north Wellington orientation within the county’s government structure.
But that doesn’t mean it was easy.
When the Conservative provincial government led by Premier Mike Harris used the hammer of the 1995 Saving and Restructuring Act to bash together a new municipal structure across Ontario, many local politicians were initially resistant.
“I don’t think anyone on Palmerston council wanted anything to do with it,” said Ron Elliott, a current Town of Minto councillor who was also the last pre-amalgamation mayor of Palmerston and the second mayor of Minto.
Elliott said most members of the councils in the other three municipalities felt the same way.
“We thought we were doing a good job and would like to stay on our own.”
However, Elliott said local politicians looked at the results of the first provincial commission appointed under Bill 26, which ordered the ?amalgamation of the City of Chatham with all municipalities within Kent County, and decided they would be better off to create something on their own, than have their hand forced.
Current Minto Mayor George Bridge, a native of Minto Township, was working and living elsewhere at the time of amalgamation. However, he recalls following the amalgamation process in what became Oro-Medonte.
“Everybody ran into the same problems I think. It was very difficult to put two municipalities together in a forced marriage type thing and I’m sure it was tough in Minto,” he said.
By the Elliott became mayor in 2001, he said the new municipality was struggling with the need to keep up with new regulations and infrastructure requirements in a town where citizens still felt their tax dollars should be spent in the home communities.
“We had a lot of money we had to spend. It was really mandated that we spend it and it was mandated where it was to be spent,” he noted. “But a lot of people in the community would look at it and say, ‘You’re spending Palmerston’s money in Clifford, or you’re spending Harriston’s money in Palmerston,’ or the other way around.”
Current Minto treasurer Gordon Duff agrees with that assessment. New water towers that went up in Palmerston and Harriston shortly after amalgamation are a good illustration of the type of work that had to be done in the new municipalities. By 2005, Minto had put up new $1.5 million water towers in all three urban municipalities, “with basically zero dollars in government grants.”
Minto CAO Bill White says the infrastructure spending eventually levels out.
“Often the Clifford water system is talked about as being one that needed the help of the other users, but the Clifford sewage system is very strong. Palmerston’s sewer system, we need to work on. So, in terms of those hard services I think those customers benefited from being part of a Minto-wide sewer and water service.”
Outside political factors also affected the actions of early amalgamated councils, notes Elliott. At the same time they were dealing with their own amalgamations, municipalities were also faced with decisions about whether to maintain municipal police forces or switch to OPP policing. In this case, a county-wide contract with the OPP meant the end of municipal police forces in Harriston and Palmerston.
The resulting decrease in police presence led to at least a perception among the public of increased crime, particularly break-ins and vandalism. At the time, Minto council decided to take action. Having an enhanced contract for OPP policing in the municipality’s three urban centres would have cost $100,000 per year each, said Elliott. So for $80,000 in total, Minto council hired a private security company called Community Patrol Service (CPS) to watch for vandalism and other problems.
“They were supposed to be the eyes and ears of the police. All they were supposed to do was watch out for problems and report to the OPP. But we also made them bylaw officers and they got a little over-exuberant and started handing out tickets,” Elliott recalls, adding unfavourable public reaction to the CPS presence in the community led to a quick end to the experiment.
“The idea was right, but people didn’t like it, so we didn’t get a chance to work through the growing pains,” Elliott recalls.
Minto, like municipalities across the county and the province, went through a measure of trial and error during the initial phase of amalgamation. One experiment, initiated during Elliott’s administration, that appears to have worked out well is the establishment of an economic development and tourism department, with the hiring of business and economic manager Belinda Wick, a Minto native with a degree in tourism administration.
The economic development focus has helped to unite the community, says Bridge.
“Because we have economic development, we don’t have a lot of the little turf wars we used to have,” he noted. In pre-amalgamation days, Bridge recalls, municipalities basically set up industrial parks in their own communities and “fought to try to get something in.”
He believes municipalities are now looking at the benefits of development on a more regional level.
“If Wellington North got a factory it would help us. If we got it, it would help them.”
Bridge says initiatives like setting up downtown revitalization committees in Palmerston, Harriston and Clifford means all segments of the community feel included.
Elliott notes economic development was formerly handled in Palmerston by individual council members. He says the decision to create the position “has proven out. It’s a full-time job.”
“By having economic development we’ve been able to get a lot of programs in place with good grant procedures; we would never have got them without that,” says Bridge, who adds none of the former municipalities could have afforded to create such a position.
“We wouldn’t have an economic development officer if we were individualized. So I think being in this format we’re in today, it’s helped us keep a leg up. By having economic development we’ve done great downtown revitalization, all these little things. If it was left up to individual towns, they wouldn’t be able to afford that.
“You see other towns in the county are looking at that now. They’re seeing Wellington North, ourselves, Mapleton has an economic development committee now, they’re all looking at doing more economic development now because they are seeing the need of it,” Bridge continued.
“The three downtown revitalization committees, they’ve just done a super job. And that was brought on with the RED (Rural Economic Development) grant funding which we wouldn’t have got if Belinda hadn’t been very connected, and because of her connections with the different groups in the government, and the fact that we’re out there and working on it.” Even after the RED funding ran out, Bridge points out, “we got such a good benefit from it we put $15,000 in the budget, $5,000 for each community, because we’ve got to keep it going.”
Business retention programs are also part of Minto’s economic development planning, said Bridge.
“We do a business retention survey every two years, so we get an idea what businesses are doing; are they growing, are they needing help?
“Right now we’ve identified workforce [as an issue],” because the local unemployment rate of four percent, means some businesses are having a hard time finding workers.
“So we’re in a situation where we’ve created a great economic climate, but for us to attract more business, we actually have to get more workforce.”
Bridge said the municipality is looking to areas like immigration to increase the local population and also ways to keep existing residents in the area.
“The one advantage of government getting a little bigger, and getting professionals at certain levels of the administration, is you can really think outside the box and I think that governments, municipal governments, have to start to think about different ways to invest. We bought the school property (the former Harriston senior school) with the idea that you create some development. You’re not going to develop it yourself, but you create some opportunity. We know we need some senior housing and whatever. We’ll try to find a developer that wants to do some senior housing and we won’t lose those people that have to leave town now when they want to get out of their big house.”
Because it has an economic development committee, Bridge says Minto is attracting expertise from outside the municipality. Representatives from OMAFRA, Guelph Works, Wightman Telecom, Minto Chamber of Commerce and the Wellington Waterloo Enterprise Centre are all represented on the local committee.
“So you’ve got all the players at the table,” said Bridge.
The economic development efforts have also helped the municipality develop a good relationship with the local chamber of commerce, said Bridge.
John Mock, a local business owner and president of the Minto Chamber of Commerce, agrees.
“One hundred per cent,” said Mock, when asked if the municipality is responsive to local business concerns. “They listen to us and vice versa. We’re working with each other all the time.”
Mock, who is part of the Harriston Downtown Revitalization Committee, says that program works well for businesses in all three municipalities, as does the activity generated around local cultural programs and other municipal initiatives.
The Move to Minto Campaign is a good example of an initiative designed to achieve aims of both the municipality and the business community, Mock explained. Attracting new residents meets many of the municipality’s objectives for long-term population growth and stability and it also promotes local real estate sales and contractors, he added.
Mock feels there’s little point in contemplating what would have happened without amalgamation, or thinking about turning back the clock.
Minto will work, he says, “Because it has to. There’s no going back. If you do, what have you got – divorce? What’s a divorce set you back? Fifteen or 20 years financially. I don’t even think about it as Harriston, Palmerston and Clifford any more.”
White, who joined Minto as CAO in April 2011 after a stint in Georgian Bluffs, another amalgamated community, agrees that economic development efforts in Minto are more advanced than most similar-sized municipalities.
“The thing that stands out is economic development, the culture business development work that’s going on. Cultural planning for a rural community of our size – it’s unique. It’s one of the things I heard about before I even came here,” said White.
He feels the value of working together is obvious, but considers “the strength of the individual communities,” one of the assets of Minto as a whole.
“We talk about Minto all the time and it’s important to do that; it’s something we market. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the individual communities having identities. They have long histories and we celebrate all of them.”
While acknowledging the existence of a public perception that amalgamation has resulted in significant staffing increases, local officials said the staffing numbers are evolutionary and a result of operating in an increasingly regulated world.
Counting only full-time employees, Duff says the four former municipalities had about 25 staff working in offices, arenas and public works yards. Today, the Town of Minto has 35 full-time staff in those areas. There were 24 councillors, now there are seven.
White believes amalgamated municipalities may have evolved differently, if it weren’t for the Walkerton water crisis in 2000, when seven people died and thousands became ill from a contaminated municipal water supply.
“We were gaining some freedom to operate. Things were very free flowing for a while and then Walkerton happened,” says White. “When the Liberals came into power later on, what we’ve seen was a renewed commitment financially to municipalities, but with great power came great expectations, so to speak. They have an agenda…and the small municipalities, in my mind, would not have been able to accommodate that agenda.
“I’m talking about drinking water quality management standards, accessibly act, public sector accounting requirements. We’re getting into new green energy obligations, new building code requirements. So when we look at our employment structure where we were and where we are, what we had before was quite a few political representatives and fewer staff,” said White, noting the ratio has gone from “almost half and half,” to significantly more staff and many fewer politicians.
“So you’ve created, I’ll call it a more mature level of government, where the civil servants, public servants, provide information to council, take the things provincially that are mandated and try to bring it forward in a cohesive way so that they can make policy decisions. So it’s a very clear separation between administration and policy decision-making now.”
Bridge agrees, “You might have saved some money had Walkerton not happened.”
“We’re looking at six or seven people running our water and our sewers, where in the old days they might have had somebody part time that was doing a plow and they did the water tests on the side and sent them in. They didn’t have to have the specialized training like they do today; they didn’t have to do it on a daily basis like they do today,” he said.
Duff said, “I’ve seen the evolution from clerk/treasurer to clerk and treasurer, to clerk and treasurer and tax collector, and somehow we’re all busy.
“It’s part of the new world we’re in and for better or worse it’s a more complicated world and the quality of staff that we hire now is much higher, because we demand a lot more training. Between us and all the professional associations, there’s so much more mandatory professional development and continuing education, just to stay where you are.
“Yes there’s more staff, but even if we hadn’t amalgamated, and somehow the municipalities found the money, they would have hired more staff to do all the jobs that are necessary in 2012 that maybe didn’t exist in 1999,” Duff concluded.
Duff also notes it’s possible separate municipalities would have even more staff than today’s amalgamated units due to duplication.
“The requirements and regulations that have come down, I think the four municipalities would have really struggled. For example could you imagine having three compliance officers to do basically the same thing and prepare three different manuals of operating procedures, when now we do it once?”
Bridge points out the municipality has actually been reducing staff recently, combining the CAO and clerk positions, eliminating the parks and recreation manager post by attrition and moving to a single facilities manager. The high training level of current staff results in savings in other ways, he contends. Because, in White, the municipality has a CAO with planning experience, and in new public works director Brian Hansen an engineering ticket, the mayor expects to show significant savings in consulting fees in the future.
Taking all factors into account, are municipalities better off amalgamated today than they would have been on their own?
“There would be no way that small municipalities like the township or Clifford or even Palmerston or Harriston could have survived with some of the downloading that came at us right after the amalgamation,” states Bridge.
“To be brutally honest, the world of 2012, bearing in mind the demands and requirements, I don’t think could have been met by the older, unamalgamated municipalities, at least without huge tax increases and huge borrowing,” says Duff.
“It really goes to whether you feel like the government should be set up to protect the people and provide a base level of service? If you think the government should have a role in that, then I would say yes. People have better services and have more programs protecting them so they know it’s safe. That’s not to say the individual municipalities did a bad job, but there’s now some one watching to make sure,” says White.
Added Bridge, “At the end of the day, we have to let the past go to rest and we have to drive the bus we’re on. I see good things for Minto. I see real positives here. I think we have a good thing going and we just have to keep it on the rails.”
This is the fourth of an eight-part series examining the amalgamation that reconfigured Wellington County from 21 municipalities to seven in the late 1990s.
