Push is on for extra regional councillor
All West Lincoln wants for Christmas is a second regional councillor, and Mayor Doug Joyner is hustling like Santa Claus to deliver it.
With an army of councillor elves fanning across Niagara, the mayor has been touring area municipalities in rapid succession in hopes of convincing councils to help him get his list checked off.
“We’re six for six,” said Joyner, who will be speaking to St. Catharines council on Monday. “Six presentations, six yeses.”
Already this month, Wainfleet, Port Colborne, Fort Erie, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Niagara Falls have joined West Lincoln in consenting to a bylaw to increase the composition of regional council to 32 members from 31 by adding a councillor for West Lincoln.
While Joyner is in St. Catharines council chambers today, other West Lincoln councillors will be concurrently pitching the idea in Grimsby, Lincoln and Pelham.
On Tuesday they’ll hit Thorold and Welland to complete the dozen-city tour.
West Lincoln currently has one regional councillor — the mayor — and he says he needs help with the workload as the township grows. It’s anticipated West Lincoln could double in population to 30,000 in the next 25 years.
Joyner says as both a mayor and sole township representative at the region, he’s dealing with volumes of budget numbers, not to mention planning, public works, social services and corporate services reports.
“It’s volumes and volumes of reading,” he said.
Regional council voted 17-10 on Dec. 7 to add another West Lincoln member to its council chambers. Now, the majority of Niagara’s 12 lower-tier councils, and representing the majority of Niagara’s population, need to vote yes to make it happen.
All 12 councils need to deal with the matter by Dec. 31 to get the new councillor on the 2018 municipal election ballot, hence Joyner’s Christmas rush.
Not everyone, though, is convinced the idea is a gift worth giving.
Port Dalhousie Coun. Bruce Williamson said St. Catharines is grossly underrepresented on regional council.
“I’m dead set against us granting another seat to a smaller community who already has more representatives by far per capita than we do, making it an even worse disparity,” he said.
St. Catharines city staff crunched numbers from the 2016 census data at the request of council to figure out the true representation by population on regional council.
A memo from city clerk Bonnie Nistico-Dunk in September showed Wainfleet has the most representation per population, with one regional councillor representing 6,372 people. By contrast, St. Catharines has one regional councillor for every 19,016 people.
West Lincoln has one councillor representing 14,500 people.
Williamson said voting for an extra councillor for West Lincoln — which would put it at one councillor per 7,250 people — would work squarely against the interests of St. Catharines citizens and further undermine the city’s voice at the region.
“It’s a fundamental precept of democracy that you have representation by population,” Williamson said. “We already have too many politicians at the region and we’re going to add more and make it less equitable? I don’t know how anyone can justify voting for it.”
Williamson said he doesn’t think St. Catharines needs more regional politicians — the region needs a governance review.
That’s something Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce wants, too.
In a Nov. 29 letter to regional council, chamber CAO Mishka Balsom wrote the composition of the council as a whole is “moving in the wrong direction.”
She said Niagara has the highest number of municipal politicians per capita compared to Ontario areas with populations of more than 250,000. As well, the distribution of Niagara regional councillors doesn’t accurately reflect the population distribution of Niagara’s municipalities — there are 1.1 to 3.9 councillors per 25,000 residents depending on the area.
“While we sympathize with any member of council attempting to combine the duties of a mayor and a regional councillor, we are also aware that adding another elected official does not automatically equal better governance,” Balsom wrote.
West Lincoln’s mayor agrees there should be governance review, but believes the township shouldn’t go without more representation until that happens.
Joyner said West Lincoln has explained that position to the municipal councils visited so far.
“We’ve been very straightforward,” Joyner said. “We haven’t shied away from the fact there needs to be regional governance review in the term 2018 to 2022.
“They just simply understand that is a tremendous time of growth for the township of West Lincoln and that is the time when we need a second regional representative to help us deal with that growth.”