Mayor Jeff Leal’s campaign promise of installing an information hub for residents and developers called Service Peterborough is facing an uphill battle following a motion to defer a staff report on the renovation project and return with other, hopefully cheaper, options at the June 17th General Committee Meeting.

During the election campaign in 2022, Leal told Arthur that he intended Service Peterborough to be “a one stop multifaceted centre for developers to apply, process, and expedite approvals in the planning department to get more stock built in the community.” 

However, during the General Committee meeting on June 3rd, Council was looking at a staff report which outlined that the project would require a massively inflated budget.

Last year, staff recommended that the budget line for the renovations be increased by $275,000 from the $625,000 originally approved through a June 12th staff report meaning the recommendation from staff would have pushed the total proposed cost to $900,000.

$660,000 was initially approved by Council in June 2023 for a number of related projects; however, only $553,000 of that total was intended for the renovation itself.

When asked by Councillor Gary Baldwin, who expressed his hesitancy to support a deferral on a capital project, to explain the implications of deferring this project or limiting its scope, Commissioner of Finance and Corporate Support Services, Richard Freymond explained that “if we defer the project and we amend the scope, we will lose a little bit.” 

“This is a very competitive bid and so if we change the project scope, we will drastically change the scope. And so…it will cost less, but we will get less at the end of the day,” Freymond told Council. 

Meanwhile, Councillor Alex Bierk was unapologetic in his concerns regarding the inflated budget. 

“I appreciate the Mayor's leadership in this,” he said. “I was prepared to sort of challenge the project overall, out of the pure frustration of having a project shift so much.”

Bierk would go on to ask about the delays in beginning the project, which he noted was supposed to be completed at the end of 2023. 

To this point, Freymond explained that the lead staff member in charge of the project had retired and that staff had needed to work through a transition period. 

In what has become a familiar refrain at Council over these past few months, Councillors sought answers to why they had needed to ask for plans prior to having to make a decision on whether to approve this budget increase. 

“We should have all the information so that we can make informed decisions on behalf of taxpayers,” Councillor Keith Riel said. “I agree with the mayor and what he wants to do—it came in over budget—I guess we're gonna have to pare it back and we're going to do the renovations to the money that council said we're going to spend on the project.”

Later, Councillor Joy Lachica would call the choice for a deferral a “sage approach” and one which reflects the current fiscal realities of the City. 

“We are in a time where we need to exercise some fiduciary restraint and this is a prime example of a way we could do that we need to bring it in, as the previous speaker said, and revisit the design so that it does fit with with the allotted budget,” Lachica said.

Before the vote, Bierk added that the City has “a somber road ahead” as Council begins preliminary budget talks on June 11th while facing a $135M capital investment shortfall according to the City’s Asset Management Plan which was also presented on June 3rd. 

The motion to defer the recommendation contained in the staff report pending further options from staff to be presented on June 17th passed unanimously and will need to be ratified at next week’s Council meeting on June 10th.

Community Health Centre Update:

Also on the agenda for June 3rd was an update from members of the Board of Peterborough’s planned Community Health Centre (CHC).

Peterborough CHC Board Chair, Jonathan Bennett, and the Centre’s Interim Executive Director, David Jeffery, gave an update

Bennett and Jeffery reported to Council that they intend to set the CHC up in Peterborough Square Mall and according to reports from the Examiner, the Centre will operate in the space previously held by TD Bank.

Jeffery noted that they had been successful in receiving annual funding for the operations of the Peterborough CHC in the amount of $4.8M, or 60% of what they had initially asked for.

This, according to Jeffery, is both good news and challenging news which has led the team to make some choices on how to define the role of the CHC as it begins its work in the community.

“So I'm now talking to community members, hospital, public health, many others, and asking them what do you see? Now that we have this reduced allocation, what should be our priorities?” he told Councillors.  

“The funding is for primary health care, comprehensive primary care, professional based primary care teams, chronic disease management, preventative screening, and harm reduction work,” Jeffery continued, while explaining that the CHC is looking at “partnerships” and needs to avoid duplicating services already offered by organizations such as Fourcast, the CMHA and the Brock Mission.

Fairhaven Long-Term Care Home Expansion: 

Fairhaven Long-Term Care Home is seeking support from the City in its application for a planned extension which, if successful, will see 128 new beds added to the 256 already on site.

Representatives detailed a plan which would see an application submitted to the Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care by June 2024. The total cost of the project is estimated to be between $83M-$92M, however Fairhaven’s Executive Director Nancy Rooney told Council that the expansion would create 200 more jobs when asked by Councillor Baldwin.  

In the same exchange, Baldwin asked if the addition of 128 beds will count towards the City’s targets for building homes set by the province to which Fairhaven’s Board Chair Karl Moher, responded that he wasn’t sure “whether this will help or not in that count.”

Peterborough received $1.88M in March of 2024 in recognition of exceeding a provincially set target for building new homes. That same month, Peterborough Currents reported that according to documents supplied to them by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, 506 of the new housing units Peterborough built in 2023, 256—or more than 50%—were long-term care beds.

In October of last year, Peterborough made an agreement with the provincial government to build 4,700 new housing units by 2031 in exchange for a portion of an available $1.2B Building Faster Fund.

Peterborough Accessibility Plan:

Finally, an update to the City’s accessibility plan was presented to Council by Peterborough’s Accessibility Compliance Specialist, Mark Buffone. 

This plan will be effective from 2024-2028 as under provincial legislation, registered municipalities must update their accessibility plan every five years.

“The purpose of the Accessibility Plan is to identify, remove, and prevent failures and the other purpose is to outline the City's commitment to accessibility,” Buffone said. “As of 2022, data from Statistics Canada has shown that 27% of the population in Canada has at least one disability and the rates are actually a little bit higher here in Ontario.”

Buffone went on to highlight the economic impact of ensuring the City is accessible, noting that ensuring accessibility will increase consumer spending and business profits as well as employee productivity. 

The benefits, Buffone explained, “are relevant to not only the private sector, but also the public sector.” 

“Accessibility is also going to increase innovation, tourism access to impact powerful employees with disabilities,” he said “Accessibility also increases access to funding opportunities. So from a funding perspective, it is common for major funding programs to require eligible projects.”

All reports and the single deferral presented at the June 3rd meeting were passed unanimously, with Councillor Dave Haacke declaring an interest on the Community Health Centre update. All decisions of the General Committee are subject to debate and discussion at Council on June 10th. 

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