Amalgamation of Victoria County into City of Kawartha Lakes 25 years ago has resulted in positives and negatives but one thing is certain — there’s no going back

The following is the final segment in a four-part series taking a look back at the amalgamation of Victoria County into the City of Kawartha Lakes 25 years ago.

More than two decades have passed since the residents of the former Victoria County voted to de-amalgamate.

The years have provided plenty of time for it to become clear that, whether they are Conservative or Liberal, provincial politicians have no more interest in reversing the commissioner’s order to create the City of Kawartha Lakes than they did in making the decision in the first place.

It has also been time enough to see it has impacted everyone’s life in different ways.

“Because there was so much negative feedback, it forced me to rethink my decision. After mulling it over a number of times, I am more convinced than ever that I made the right choice. I still feel proud of it,” reflected Kitchen.

Chris Hodgson has a different perspective than he did in 2003 when, as the Minister of Municipal Affairs, he called the vote on deamalgamation.

“I thought that the small-town history was being overlooked, the people who had made it great were not being listened to, and I think I made my point pretty clear. In hindsight, I think it has worked out really well. There are good roads, the garbage gets picked up, and there is professional staff. They have the budget to afford the best. Business wants to move to the region, and there are clear rules for development and protection of the natural environment. Maybe Harry was right, and to his credit, he did a fantastic job. He set up a structure with a road map that the new council could follow. Toronto did not have as good of a road map and they still haven’t sorted it all out. Harry spent a lot of time on the HR of the new government, and that made it a lot easier for the new council to manage it,” said Hodgson.

City of Kawartha Lakes Mayor Doug Elmslie acknowledges amalgamation was a contentious time.

“It was sold on how much money would be saved. The reality was the money wasn’t saved at the municipal level, but rather at the provincial level, and this could be a reason why there has been no personal income tax increase since then. Over time, and as shown in dissertations by Adam Found and John Beddows, single-tier municipalities are more efficient and operate more cheaply than two-tier municipalities. There are both advantages and disadvantages to amalgamation.”

Two sides of the same coin

On the positive, emergency services are more efficient and cost effective, and departments — including parks and recreation, public works, engineering, human services, waste management and building and planning — have evolved to provide consistent services and standard across the City.

However, it has also created more bureaucracy, failed to respond to further downloading of services from the province, especially roads, resulted in infrastructure gaps and, from a public perspective, created difficulties navigating and managing the system, which takes longer to get things done.

When asked during interviews what has changed, practically all of the councillors who served the former municipalities agreed: government culture.

The move to reverse the province’s decision to amalgamate Victoria County into the City of Kawartha Lakes even drew “royal opinion” during the Kinmount Fair.

“The one thing we have lost is local government representation. It is a lot harder for people to go to the council chamber in Lindsay and ask to make a deputation to have an issue brought up — it is certainly intimidating,” said former Woodville reeve Len Thornbury. “When council was (further) reduced to eight members, it made it less accessible. The whole city is a big geographic area for eight people to cover. We have lost the connectivity between the residents and the councillors.”

Today, very few people would feel comfortable walking into City Hall to talk to the clerk about their concerns.

“The nice thing about a small township council was that you could come, pull up a chair, sit around the table and easily talk about your issue. It was more relaxed, because it was smaller, and everyone knew each other,” added former Verulam councillor Pat Warren who presently represents Ward 2 on the current council.

Being responsive to communities was challenging enough with 16 councillors; eight has made it all the more difficult.

Red tape and paperwork has made it hard for many people to be able to contribute to their communities, to the point where it is perceived the City does not want there to be events anymore because of liability and insurance. Administrative priorities have also created public frustration. The City is just too big and too complex, and the people setting the priorities never see the consequences of their decisions.

Members of the Voices of Central Ontario (VOCO) believed their votes during a referendum regarding reversing the amalgamation of Victoria County into the City of Kawartha Lakes had no problem “voicing” their opinion when the results fell on deaf ears.

“Fenelon Township had it right, this was a mistake,” noted former reeve Faye McGee. “It was efficient and run by council. It was small enough that the right hand knew what the left hand was doing. People didn’t have to wait a year to get an answer on a building permit application, they were generally attended to within a few days. We represented the people we were put there to represent. In the good old days of Victoria County they got the job done with less than 400 employees, none were in the Sunshine Club, and now there’s just under 22,000 employees. How many are in the Sunshine Club? We hired local people who cared, now they bring in people from outside the community, who often don’t stay. Today firefighters earn $25 or $28 per hour. It used to be $10.49 per hour and they were responding with their own vehicles, because they loved what they were doing. It is a bureaucracy now and a nightmare. People have moved away because the taxes are too high, and the debt is too high too.”

Recognizing representation

But not everyone who was involved in preamalgamation politics shared McGee’s view that, since amalgamation, “everything has gone down hill.”

“Fire facilities have been improved immensely. Now there are fire stations located near communities, and it no longer matters whether they were built in one township when they are needed just over the boundary in the next,” said former Emily Township reeve Joe McGuire, citing a positive from amalgamation is improved practical application of planning and zoning via a long-term perspective for the region as a whole. “There would be a lot of demand for subdivisions, in urban centres or maybe in a field somewhere. Without a long-term plan those developments could have taken place in a haphazard manner. In 20 years, Lindsay is going to look a lot different than does is now. There will be a need for long term planning for parks, recreation, trails, infrastructure, protecting farms and wetlands, and those needs will only be amplified moving forward.”

Thurston noted the City of Kawartha Lakes made previously unaffordable infrastructure improvements possible in Woodville such as repaving roads and putting in new sidewalks.

“The million-dollar arena upgrade is something that Woodville could never have paid for, without a major grant from the province — and that was being cut in the 1990s,” he said. “Today we have a lot higher level of service.”

When it comes to governance, many could argue representation over savings.

“I represent the former Somerville Township, Bobcaygeon and half of Verulam Township,” explained Warren of Ward 2. “Before amalgamation each municipality had five councillors, so today I represent the same area where there were once 12-and-a-half councillors.”

While conducting the interviews to write this story, it became clear that some of the political leaders who were involved in the debates surrounding amalgamation have a tendency to demean the people that they disagree with. Even 25 years later, some still assert that their position was correct and do not come across as having made the effort to understand those who have a different perspective.

For instance, one councillor refers to John Panter as “John Ranter.” Another elected official stated (off-the record) that the results of the vote on the minister’s question do not truly reflect the views of the people, because votes were heavily weighted by Voices of Central Ontario (VOCO) supporters.

Some also implied that their opponents’ point of view should not be included in this article. Could it be that the reason why amalgamation was so contentious in Victoria County because some political leaders refused to find common ground with their colleagues who had a different point of view?

For many years around 2000, there was a heated public debate about the structure that municipal government would take. Many had strong opinions about whether the Victoria County representational structure or a new City of Kawartha Lakes was better. These debates dominated public discourse related to municipal government locally, obscuring the fact that municipal government was evolving provincially in response to changes the government made to how it functioned, as the world around it changed.

There are as many stories of the legacy of amalgamation as there are people in the City of Kawartha Lakes. Everyone has had their own experience.

So, how has the City of Kawartha Lakes impacted your life?

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