Grey County’s Warden is looking forward to next year after a busy and productive 2023.
Brian Milne says that coming into this year as Warden and as Mayor of the Township of Southgate brought fresh faces and new perspectives.
“For our member municipality in Southgate started off here with a council of representatives that had varying levels of experience in both politics and municipal politics specifically. And we’ve come to a place where I think we’ve got pretty good working teams. Everyone’s got up to speed in remarkable fashion, and the things that we’ve got accomplished are telling that we’re a good team and we can work well together.”
While new growth in his home municipality has caused some staffing changes, township staff are working to ensure that everything is done. In particular, due to those growth-related staffing changes, the council is still waiting to see a draft budget for 2024, but Milne is confident that they’ll see one shortly after the holiday season.
Milne says there’s good work being done on projects across Grey County, from roads and infrastructure to the supportive housing project in Owen Sound.
He says that a challenge that came up over the past 12 months was the need for housing throughout the province, but he says that it’s not just about the need for more homes.
“The housing thing is very much a crisis. It’s a supply-and-demand thing. There just simply are not enough houses. And so the push from both provincial and federal is to build more houses, build, build, build… and that’s fine, we need more houses. But houses themselves do not create a community. There’s education, there’s health care, there’s recreating, there’s infrastructure, there’s all kind of things that create a community where people want to be.”
As co-chair for the Grey Bruce Board of Health, he says that he’s happy with the health unit as it exists and the efforts being made, but he says that he’s a bit concerned if the province wants to merge health units without appropriate staffing and funding.
“For the past year, there has been the notion from the provincial government for some amalgamations in the public health realm. Grey Bruce in my mind works well. It’s a lot of geography, and to suggest that we should embrace a model where the provincial government has thrown out where they’d like to see a health unit that serves half a million people… to gather that amount of people in rural Ontario, that’s a huge amount of geography. And you’re still going to need the same number, if not more, of front-line people serving the needs of the community. So I’m not sure that increasing the geography of any particular health unit is going to bring the benefits that some seem to think that it will bring.”
Milne says that he’s hoping that upper levels of government will do more to help not only the development of more housing options but also for those supportive services that communities need.
“I would hope to see the upper levels of government truly be committed to the things that they should be doing — health care, education, those kinds of things. Because we see at the lower level, we see programs put in place by ourselves or by others that cost whatever at the time and the provincial government is funding it, and all of a sudden five years later, there’s no inflation factor put in there and they’re giving us one or whatever percent increase in funding — if any funding increase, and yet our costs for that service go up 5, 6, or even double-digit increases.”
On a more lighthearted note, Milne also wanted to take a moment to be proud of a new addition to the Southgate — the community’s first-ever water tower.
“Here in Southgate is our new water tower. While water towers aren’t necessarily the most sexy thing to talk about it, we’re pretty proud of this new water tower. It’s the first water tower we’ve ever built here in Southgate. In fact, Dundalk now has the highest body of water in all of Ontario in that water tower because if you work out the elevation of things, and Dundalk is the highest population centre in Ontario, and you put a 150-foot water tower on top of that, we’re actually higher than the observation deck of the CN Tower. True story.”
