Ramara Township council has voted to cancel an upcoming open house following concerns about misinformation and “torches and pitchforks” being aimed at township officials.
Residents and officials were set to gather on June 6 for a water and wastewater open house meeting, with discussion to include township water and wastewater infrastructure, potential rate increases, planned projects, and resident concerns and questions.
Council received 31 pages of questions ahead of the meeting, with residents raising a wide variety of concerns regarding high water and wastewater rates, the high costs of effluent hauling and upgrades to township spray fields, cost disparities in rates across the township, and much more.
On Monday, council decided to cancel the open house at a special meeting during which several members of council sounded alarm bells about misinformation and the potential for staff abuse during the meeting, among other concerns.
“I am not going to have the torches and pitchforks come in at our staff, and … when I read some of these unrelated questions and some of the attitude that I've seen online, I am not going to expose staff to that,” said Ramara Mayor Basil Clarke.
“What I would do is I would totally cancel the open house. I've seen some terrible stuff on Facebook, in both the north end of the (township) and in the south end,” said Coun. David Snutch. “Staff are being made to look like they have no idea what they're doing, and I just think the whole thing's going to turn into a circus.”
Coun. Dana Tuju said the bulk of resident questions arise from “misinformation that has been pervasively distributed online” in what she views as a deliberate attack on staff and elected council members past and present.
Though there are planned 8- and 5-per-cent hikes to water and wastewater rates, respectively, Tuju said these rate increases translate “to about $5 a month or so for municipal water or for municipal wastewater users.”
“This increase was long overdue, given the rate freezes during COVID, and necessary to keep up with maintenance and repairs so that we can avoid having to periodically borrow from general taxpayer reserves and the threat of unsustainability,” she said.
“Whatever is left to talk about, in my opinion, is basically chasing conspiracy theories and accusations of wrongdoing that are confusing residents, creating division and wasting taxpayer dollars, rather than actually getting to the business of working towards solutions.”
In lieu of the open house, council directed staff to answer a shortlist of questions through an FAQ, which will be presented to council at its committee of the whole meeting on July 8.
“Delivering this information (in an open house) is not as accurate as doing an FAQ because an FAQ is word for word, printed out,” said Snutch. “Everybody's got a copy, not just the people that show up for the open house.”
A majority of council voted in favour of cancelling the meeting, aside from Snutch – who was absent during the vote – and Coun. Sherri Bell, who spoke strongly against the move.
Bell said staff act at the behest of council, and questioned why they would feel uncomfortable answering questions regarding the township’s actions on water and wastewater over the years.
“We said we were going to answer people's questions, and I think we should,” Bell said.
"Staff, quite simply and quite frankly, act at the direction of council, so this has nothing to do with staff, and I'm not really understanding why staff don’t want to answer questions based on decisions they didn't make.”
One resident who would like to see improvements to how the township handles water and wastewater is Lagoon City’s Sheilagh Henry, who says water rates in her neighbourhood are far higher than other municipalities she’s aware of.
“There's so many different stories. What's happened is that we have one of the highest water and sewage rates here in Lagoon City,” she told OrilliaMatters.
Henry is part of a group of residents that gave a deputation to council in February, during which they presented a petition with over 400 signatures asking the township to halt sewage treatment rate increases until a transparent review and resident consultation is carried out.
“We want more transparency. We want to be able to come up with ideas. We want to be able to talk about it, because you can't predict what the next nine years are going to be in terms of increases,” she said.
Henry blames, partly, the township's decisions which – among other consequences – has resulted in the need for costly effluent hauling from the township’s spray fields, while also raising environmental concerns due to the state of the spray fields.
She said some residents, who are not on the town’s water and wastewater system, have expressed frustration about costs they might need to bear to reduce water and wastewater rates for those on the system, and she said the water and wastewater issue has become a polarizing subject in the township.
“We just had a friend stop by, and he started saying, ‘You know what, no way I'm paying for anything to do with you,’ and we were like, 'Wait a second. We're not asking that,” she said. “It's creating a lot of discontent and divisions amongst Ramara Township.”
In an interview with OrilliaMatters, Clarke said part of the reason township water rates are high is due to the low volume of customers using its eight-plant system, and he stressed that water rates are the same throughout Ramara.
“I want to stress that we have one water system, but we have eight different plants where that water is made, and now we've got people, since we announced this open house, (who are) blaming other water plants for their price being so high,” he said.
“We only have (about) 2,000 residences on water out of over 10,000 properties,” he said. "We're a very small municipality, and that's the problem: we don't have the number of users that you need to make these systems efficient.”
Clarke said upgrades to the township’s spray fields have been on its 10-year capital plan for some time, with plans to either expand the spray field or upgrade it with tile.
Issues arose with the spray fields due to hard earth that has impacted drainage, he said, resulting in the need to spend money trucking waste out of the spray fields.
Due to inflation in recent years, Clarke said costs for upgrading the spray fields have climbed, as well.
“Of course, the price of land has jumped up in the pace of inflation since COVID that nobody saw coming, right, so the project's very expensive now where it wouldn't have been years ago. We didn't have a crystal ball,” he said. “I mean, it's easy to look back now and say hey, why didn't you (fix it)?”
He said the purpose of the open house was to explain the water and wastewater file, including planned rate hikes and a water study explaining township moves to make the system sustainable, but he said “social media (has shown) its ugly head” in the weeks leading up to the meeting.
“We're not going to facilitate that kind of meeting where people are arguing, right?” he said. “The open house is kind of being changed to an online forum … because I just wasn't going to let a bunch of angry people, angry at each other and angry at staff, in one of my municipal buildings.”