By John Francis
When he appeared as a delegation to MNBP Council on Sept 11, Bruce County Director of Corporate Services, Edward Henley came to explain the need for “Development Charges”.
The rationale is that as more and more people move to Bruce County, more and more infrastructure needs to be built to maintain our customary levels of service. County government must find a way to fund that infrastructure. It boils down to two choices – increase everybody’s property taxes by about 5% or levy a “Development Charge” on all new builds.
The Development Charge seemed the preferable choice.
He explained that of the $7,665 DC proposed for a single-family home, $6,302 (82%) was for “services related to a highway”, that is, County Roads. He pointed out that one of the proposed projects is the addition of a bike lane on the East Road from Wiarton to Lion’s Head. His documentation included a list of 28 County Road improvement projects with a total value of $86,771,000. But only one of those projects extends into MNBP — the aforementioned bike lane. That project has a proposed budget of $3.7 million, but only about half of that road section is in MNBP. That works out to barely 2% of the budget, yet MNBP is projected to contribute 12% of the Development Charge.
If you pro-rate the development charge for “services related to a highway” so that it reflects the work they propose to do in MNBP, it would come to $1,120 instead of $6,302.
But this wasn’t the only red flag in the County’s proposal.
There was also “Long-Term Care”, the second largest item on the list. When the County talks about improvements to Long-Term Care, they don’t mean our Golden Dawn facility in Lion’s Head. They mean their own facilities in Wiarton and Walkerton. The County makes no contribution to Golden Dawn.
Then there’s Parks and Recreation: the County has 171 kilometres of trails; 6 km of them are in MNBP.
Or Museums. When they say museums, they mean their museum, not ours. Bruce County Museum offers advice and cooperation to the MNBP museum in Tobermory — but no financial support whatsoever. Our museum’s budget is entirely paid by the municipality.
So when the County talks about improvements to Museums or Parks & Rec — it’s not us they’re talking about. They’re talking about improving their own facilities — in distant places where most of us never go.
Or bridges and culverts. County offices. So many categories, so little service.
If we pro-rated the whole $7,665 proposed Development Charge to reflect the service improvements Bruce County would actually provide in MNBP, it would yield a much smaller number.
But the development charges are not the whole story; they are simply the latest symptom of a much larger problem. The larger problem is that Bruce County gets 13% of its budget from MNBP’s taxes, but does not spend anywhere near 13% of that budget up here.
Municipal Councillor Smokey Golden has demanded an accounting of what Bruce County spends in MNBP. I suspect the County will be very reluctant to provide that accounting, but I hope she keeps pushing for it. It would be nice if the rest of Council joined her in making this demand.
Megan Myles, who served as an MNBP Councillor from 2018 to 2022, often said, only partly in jest, that Northern Bruce Peninsula should secede from Bruce County.
She felt — as did Councillor Golden, it was one of the few things they agreed on — that MNBP does not get full value for the $7-plus million we send to the County in taxes.
Could we become a Regional Municipality, the way Prince Edward County did? Then we’d get 75¢ out of every tax dollar where now we only get about 38¢. Think how much more we could do with double the budget!
Or maybe we could pro-rate the county tax levy to reflect the services we actually get from them…
Are these reasonable demands? Perhaps not. But they make an important point — MNBP deserves a lot better service for the funds it sends to Bruce County.
This problem is 160 years in the making. When Bruce County was founded, the Saugeen Peninsula was seen as an empty expanse of worthless rocks and water. It generated almost nothing in taxes and could lay claim to next to nothing in services from Bruce County. In 1881, for example, the combined municipalities of Eastnor, Lindsay and St Edmunds constituted much less than 1% of the tax base of Bruce County. Now MNBP generates 13% of County taxes.
The numbers have changed but the County’s budget has not changed with them. We need to keep pushing.
