Algonquin Highlands mayor Liz Danielsen is seeking a sixth consecutive year as County warden, but Minden Hills mayor Bob Carter, in running against her Dec. 12, said the position was supposed to be rotated on an annual basis and it is time for change.
Danielsen, who claimed the warden’s chair in 2019, at the outset of COVID-19, has not had to relinquish it, although she has been challenged, winning by having her name pulled out of a box last time around.
She has long said she thinks “consistency” is key.
“Our staff are our biggest resource, our strongest resource. We are about to recruit a new planning director, a new director of public works, we have a brand-new CAO,” Danielsen said. “The staff are a really strong, tightly-knit, group and I know they were nervous about (former CAO Mike Rutter) leaving and who was going to be in place. They know me. They work well with me. Continuity is important now. Having a new warden, who could very well take things in a different direction, is probably not the best thing for everybody concerned.”
The sitting warden added during her tenure, councils had tackled the shoreline preservation bylaw and short-term rental bylaw. She conceded they’d struggled with the services delivery review but, “if given another year, we can really pin down where we see some areas with success.”
Danielsen also argued that having a warden from Algonquin Highlands or Highlands East ensures more County-wide neutrality, as opposed to Dysart et al and Minden Hills.
“We’re more neutral when it comes to things like EMS bases, housing funding, and transportation. We pay into it but we don’t get anything out of it. Minden Hills and Haliburton, with greater tax bases and larger populations, they’re the ones who get those sorts of things and, consequently, there’s more conflict between the two of them, which creates more challenges within the County. That Haliburton versus Minden thing is not there for me.”
Carter focused on housing
Carter said it’s true the County is in a changing environment, but not just staff. He said they are dealing with major provincial government policy shifts that are greatly affecting all of Ontario’s 444 municipalities but fiscally impacting rural and regional communities.
“Our cost of doing business is now not significantly less than it is in bigger centres, when our situation is we have pretty much a service-based economy. We don’t have any industries or large commercial enterprises that can help us with the tax base. Any money we have to spend, we have to get from the taxpayers, so I’m really conscious of that situation and see our costs continuing to go up.”
Carter sits on the boards of the Kawartha Lakes Haliburton Housing Corporation and Habitat for Humanity. He said there’s “still so much to be done” on the file but it is difficult to build affordable housing.
“How do we subsidize the numbers we need right now? We would have to take the money out of our tax base and with no large industry or commercial establishments, I’m very concerned about the financial impact on the County on a go-forward basis.”
Carter said there is some movement, including the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus (EOWC) 7-in-7 initiative. “I’d like to sit at that (EOWC) table for a while to try to see if I can contribute and make things better for Haliburton County.”
The Minden Hills mayor added that, for him, it is not about “being warden for life or anything. The whole idea of the warden was supposed to be some sort of rotation. It was not something where wardens were put in permanently, which is why we do it once a year. I spent a year learning things at the County level and I’d like to try to make things better here in Haliburton County.
“The world is changing. Sometimes you need to not necessarily have that same thinking and that same continuity. I would say we’re in a dynamic environment with a new CEO and so on.”
He acknowledged Danielsen’s work in leading the shoreline preservation bylaw and short-term rental bylaw but said, “now we have to concentrate on some other things. It’s not a continuity thing. It’s new things. That’s where I’m at.”
