Category: Planning & Policies

Policies, plans, economic development, strategic planning, sustainability and future-looking ideas for local municipal politics.

Council Considers Possibly Thinking About Maybe Doing Something Important Sometime in the Future

Collingwood / Council / COVID-19 responses / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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We’re almost two years into an ongoing pandemic, yet all the lessons learned in jurisdictions worldwide about vaccinations and public safety have apparently simply drifted past our inept and gormless council. People are still getting ill and dying even in our own community, but our council is sort-of thinking about possibly sometime maybe in the future considering the potential to discuss the likelihood of looking at having a municipal vaccination policy. Or not to have one. And maybe they’ll even think about discussing the possibility of the likelihood of perhaps doing it before the pandemic ends. According to a recent ……… click below for more ↓

Another Council Facepalm Moment

Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ineptitude and bungling / Legal issues / Planning & Policies / Wacky WTF ideasLeave a comment

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In a story on CollingwoodToday, this week council again discussed their job-growth-and revenue-killing interim control bylaw (ICBL) that has stopped the town from issuing new home building permits for the next four or more years, until a new water treatment plant is built. Of course, none of the developers or the construction industry, or anyone in the water treatment plant business, were consulted about the ICBL before it was passed. Why would council want to set a precedent and actually engage anyone that their dictates affected?

The Sad Neglect of Collingwood’s Terminals

Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications6 Comments

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Whether you want to restore them or tear them down, you would probably like council to do SOMETHING about the decaying, century-old icon*on our waterfront. Anything, in fact. But as usual, council’s approach to actually doing something has been instead to do defer, delay, hire consultants, bloviate, ignore, pretend it doesn’t matter, and then pretend to want public input. The town’s website says: The Town of Collingwood is taking another step forward in determining the future of the Grain Terminals facility. In doing so, the Town seeks to support a healthy, strong, and vibrant community that recognizes the value of ……… click below for more ↓

Another WTF Were They Smoking Moment From Council

Collingwood / Council / Financial follies / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies10 Comments

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I read this in CollingwoodToday: At Monday night’s council meeting, Coun. Deb Doherty got support from her council colleagues to ask staff to investigate the feasibility of creating a Healing Forest in Collingwood, and report back during 2022 budget deliberations. And my first thought was, WTF are they smoking in council meetings these days? And then I thought, a “healing forest”? WTF is that? Is it the opposite of a “wounding forest”?  If I have a broken arm, can I go to the “healing forest” and get it fixed instead of the hospital? Does it dispense bandages and antibiotics? What does ……… click below for more ↓

Harbourview Dump Splash Pad Already Over Budget

Collingwood / Council / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Utilities: electricity and water4 Comments

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Local residents recently confirmed to me the dump that is under Harbourview Park occupied all the land from the wastewater treatment plant (WTP) on the east, to the Arboretum (Hickory Street) on the west, and all the land north of the rail line (now the Georgian Trail), right to the water’s edge. And that it was never properly decommissioned, merely covered with a thin layer of topsoil. And, they said, the garbage is right below the surface everywhere you dig. Including, I was again told, dead animals. So close to the surface the garbage is, I was told, that when ……… click below for more ↓

Are Cwood’s Symbolic Gestures Mere Platitudes?

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Local history / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Staff and administration2 Comments

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I’ve been wondering what the purpose is of the declaration that now starts every council and standing committee meeting. It’s a symbolic gesture, of course, but I cannot fathom what it’s meant to accomplish or who its audience is. The most recent declaration reads: For more than 15,000 years the First Nations walked upon, and cared for, the lands we now call home: Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe, and many others who cared for their families and communities, the way we now seek to care for ours. The Town of Collingwood acknowledges the Lake Simcoe-Nottawasaga Treaty of 1818 and respects all of ……… click below for more ↓

Council Wants to Give Away Our Parkland to Strangers

Collingwood / Council / deception & secrecy / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications4 Comments

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On July 29, 2020, Councillor Jeffrey (the Queen of the Unlimited Expense Account), seconded by Councillor Hamelin made a motion to give away a very large piece of Harbourview Park to a group that few if any had heard of before that date. GIVE AWAY OUR PUBLIC WATERFRONT PROPERTY! There was no public consultation, residents were not asked whether we felt handing our parkland to an out-of-town organization was a good idea, but council approved the motion unanimously.* Council agreed to turn over a vast area of public green space to an outside organization so they could build a two-storey, ……… click below for more ↓

More on the Harbourview Park Dump

Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Financial follies / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Utilities: electricity and water2 Comments

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Speaking to some long-time Collingwood residents, I’ve learned a bit more about the dump that lies under the soil at Harbourview Park and is now proposed as the site of a children’s splash pad. As far as I have been able to determine, this is being done without a proper environmental assessment having been done to ensure its safety. An EA is required by the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation, and Parks for former dump sites. The dump was meant for industrial waste but was quickly used for all sorts of garbage, including household and restaurant waste. As one resident told ……… click below for more ↓

Chris Potts Nails It

Collingwood / Council / Financial follies / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Staff and administration3 Comments

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Nailed it! In his latest blog post, former Town of Collingwood employee, Chris Potts writes about our council’s ill-conceived plan to hire a “climate change specialist” to add to the already egregiously expensive and bloated town payroll that taxpayers are burdened with: The Town of Collingwood seems to just hire and hire and hire, the next time we see this the position will be a coordinator, or director and listed on the sunshine list. Lets get to the real point here, Collingwood is in a water crisis, a building crisis, a park crisis, a leader ship crisis, did you know ……… click below for more ↓

More Secrecy, More Deception, More Conflicts

Collingwood / Conflicts of Interest / Council / deception & secrecy / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

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Once again our council scurried behind closed doors to discuss town business that should have been discussed in the open. But openness was never a watchword for this council. However, secretive and deceptive seem appropriate adjectives. Two of the three items on Friday’s (June 11) “special” council meeting were about or related to the job-and-revenue-killing interim control bylaw (ICBL) that was passed in late April without even the pretense of consultation with the public, with water companies, with developers, or with the municipalities affected by the bylaw who get water from Collingwood: Items for discussion: a) ICBL Amendments; b) Water ……… click below for more ↓

Council Fails Our Affordable Housing Residents

Collingwood / Council / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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It’s ironic how Mayor Saunderson so loudly acclaimed the “Community-based strategic plan” last term (a document that was neither community-based nor a strategic plan) yet when a major issue arises around something important that was raised in that very “plan” he seems to be awfully silent. I’m talking about the disaster that is the low-rent/affordable housing apartments at the corner of Second and High Streets. According to a recent story in CollingwoodToday, with the understated title: “Residents irate about conditions of affordable housing building”* Tenants of Collingwood affordable housing hub, say they feel like ‘hostages’ in their apartments and are ……… click below for more ↓

Developers Bite Back at ICBL

Collingwood / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial InquiryOne Comment

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‘The town created its own emergency’: Collingwood developer says project on hold due to water capacity issues. So reads the headline on a story on Simcoe.com. I laughed and laughed at the risible hypocrisy when I read this line in it: “Addressing the water treatment plant expansion and the water capacity issue is one of the town’s highest priorities,” said Mayor Brian Saunderson. “The town is aggressively pursuing remedies to address the water capacity issue.” The water capacity “crisis” is a self-made debacle created and maintained by the current council. The majority of them knew it was coming back in 2015! ……… click below for more ↓

The Irony of Council’s Obsession

Collingwood / Council / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial InquiryLeave a comment

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Oh, the delicious irony. A council that has been so obsessed with the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (aka the SVJI) at the expense of everything important in this town is suddenly now all aflutter over traffic calming and street safety. Yeah, right… Since they were first elected, our myopic councillors have done nothing about our streets, about walkability, pedestrian safety, traffic calming, or bicycle lanes — much less fix our decaying pavement and crumbling sidewalks. In fact, since most of them were on the previous council, their egregious inactivity on these issues extends back more than six years. But who’s ……… click below for more ↓

Saunderson’s Job-Killing ICBL Continued

Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ethics and behaviour / Financial follies / Hospital / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Uncategorized6 Comments

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James Madison, one of the US’s Founding Fathers said that a government “…without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a farce, or perhaps both.” Sure reads like someone describing our own council and their refusal to listen to the public during their discussion on the recent interim control bylaw (ICBL) that killed growth, development, and jobs in Collingwood: both a farce and a tragedy.* Thomas Vincent, developer of the Balmoral Estates adult lifestyle community in Collingwood,  wrote a letter to council just before this debacle, criticizing among other things, the ……… click below for more ↓

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