May 17th, 2023
Yesterday farmer and former RM councillor Bob Wilson parked his grain truck on his land off Highway 322. “FIX McKILLOP - SEPARATE AG FROM BEACH” is his personal view, and creating “public awareness” is the only way to deal with the issues between agricultural ratepayers and beach residents.
“It’s just my public statement that I don’t think McKillop will ever be fixed until they separate the beach people from the ag people.” He says the government would have to step in to restructure the municipality to accomplish this.
He said it’s a step in the direction to separate. “I’m absolutely certain the government knows how unhappy some of the people are in McKillop on both sides - the ag side and the urban beachside.”
He called the RM a “special and unique place” and said, "Any unhappiness at the beaches, the beach people have been in control of the RM for just over four years now. If you are going to blame anyone, don’t blame it on the farmers.”
Wilson said that the two groups have different dynamics, and he doesn’t see anything changing where beach residents understand the ag issues adequately to the point where everyone can work together. The two groups only have the roads in common. He feels the beach residents' main concerns are the main roads, while farmers have an interest in the less used dirt backroads, which they need to get large equipment onto their land.
The pendulum has been swinging in the RM over the last five years. The RM council was once dominated by agricultural representation; after claims of financial mismanagement, the government stepped in; eventually, divisions on the electoral map were redrawn, and then a council mainly represented by lake area residents took the seats. Over the last year, two ag representatives came to the council. Howard Arndt was acclaimed in Div 5 in a by-election in the fall of 2021, and farmer Luke Wild beat out beach area incumbent Marilyn Labatte decisively, winning 103 to 2 in 2022. “It was very apparent in the electoral vote numbers for Luke Wild that when the farmers had a choice between an ag person and a beach person, they didn’t want the beach person there.”
“The reality of McKillop is it’s not a rural municipality anymore..it’s a resort municipality. We’ve got all of these organized hamlets with their ability to keep 43% of their taxes or get returned to them and spend them as they are and not fully participate. It would be different if there was no organized hamlets they would put all of their tax money in and like unorganized, and the farmers and we would run the municipality. If the beach would need a boat launch that’s fine, it comes out of general.”
Wilson blames legislation for what he sees as unfairly favouring organized hamlets because they get a return of 43% of their tax money to decide how they will spend it. He also said that the five resort villages, which are separate entities, once had to hand their tax money to the RM. Now there is a legal fight over the responsibility and level of maintenance those roads receive because the RM owns the roads into the resorts, with legislation saying the RMs are responsible for keeping them up to a safe standard. “It’s only good as cooperation for both sides.” He believes the resort villages should have to pay for road agreements to Highway 322. “But I don’t know whether that will be included in any negotiations or not.”
Wilson claims that the way votes on the different boards, such as the landfill and fire protection agreements within the RM, are heavily influenced by beach residents from both the RM and the neighbouring RMs. “to me that’s non-functional.”
One of the issues, he says, is that the organized hamlets are not sharing administration costs. There have been attempts to have the organized hamlets contribute 2% to cover administration costs, but that hasn’t gone anywhere to date.
So what would happen if Wilson got his wish?”.... If the rest of Mckillop ag community could not survive on its own then I'm quite ok with the province restructuring and adding mckillop, in part, to the north and part to the east, or as a whole in one direction or another.”
Wilson said there has never been a petition to separate but that there may be the possibility that a petition could be used to have a public meeting on the matter.
We reached out to current Ag Councilor Howard Arndt.
“In an ideal world we should be able to work together. But we are moving farther and farther apart, unfortunately. Now I’m sure the other people on council wouldn’t necessarily agree with that but that’s my personal opinion. And we are going to see more of it as some of the other organized hamlets take advantage of the loop hole in the act and starting doing special agreements with the RM which will result in them getting tax breaks that nobody else gets.”
When asked how it could be fixed, he thought that while the organized hamlets can request a change of the mill rate factor, “The RM doesn’t have to go along with that. Right now, the money that the organized hamlets are sinking into their reserve accounts is actually being funded by everyone.”
Arndt noted that the reserve accounts that organized hamlets have built up have created a shortfall whereby the rest of the RM has to come up with the money to cover it. He gave an example the community of Collingwood is allocating the money to building a $100,000 gazebo. He said that it has created “inequity” and “a whole lot of people feel that it isn’t fair. They are paying the same amount of money per 1000$ of assessment, yet the organized hamlets can have all of these other things.”
We tried reaching Reeve Bob Schmidt, but he didn’t respond by publication.
