South Bruce Peninsula Mayor Jay Kirkland is looking at some highlights and challenges from 2024.
First on his highlight list is a $3 million grant from the MTO to complete the major ‘Big Dig’ infrastructure and streetscape project in downtown Wiarton. Kirkland says that’s expected to get underway in fall of 2025 or spring of 2026. It will address the southern half of infrastructure work on Berford Street that had been postponed due to cost.
Another highlight Kirkland says, is the purchase of the old Sobey’s Foodland site by Bluewater Park for a new South Bruce Peninsula town hall in Wiarton. “We’ve just got our first set of drawings back an hopefully we’ll go through those drawings and be tendering here in the spring of this new year 2025. So that will be nice,” says Kirkland.
“The completion of the bandshell in Bluewater Park was a big success this summer,” says Kirkland noting a number of bands played in the new bandshell throughout the summer. “Everything’s been going good. We got a lot of good comments about that.”
Looking at some of the challenges the Town faced in 2024 was the cancellation of the Grey Transit Route to Wiarton and Sauble Beach due to a removal or provincial funding for the service. The Town and the Counties had been contributing funding as well, but the removal of a large chunk of money from the province made it too expensive for the lower tiers to pick up. “That was where the big dollars were coming from. From the provincial funding on this program,” says Kirkland.
He adds, “We tried having meetings with them (the provincial government) and Bruce County had a delegation with them to try to keep it going and we thought they were going to keep funding it but they announced they’re not going to.”
That route stops December 31st.
Also in 2024, the Town was denied its request for appeal in the Sauble Beach boundary court case. The Town had asked to appeal the 2023 boundary claim decision which ruled that all of Sauble Beach, up to a point between about 2.5 km north of the Sauble Beach sign is part of Saugeen First Nation’s reserve.
The Town also asked to appeal a follow up (2024) order to pay $1.61 million to Saugeen First Nation and about $470,000 thousand to the federal government in relation to the court case. Both were denied.
Kirkland says council hasn’t yet decided how it will move forward on the matter.
Meanwhile, he says the increase in police costing council had sounded the alarm about has been addressed.
During its budget discussion in November, the Town was looking at a roughly $400,000 increase in the cost of policing because the Ministry of the Solicitor General negotiated a new collective agreement that included retroactive pay and ongoing pay increases. Council advocated for a change in the funding model, and joined the outcry from a number of municipalities who are served by OPP.
Since then, the provincial ministry announced it would provide funding to cover the cost increases.
Kirkland says, “It ended up being a wash, when we took all our calculations and percentages. We were going to have to pull about $400,000 or $430,000 from reserves, but what they’re going to do, with this calculation they sent us is give us a monthly credit on 2025 amount that we pay for policing.” He says that will even things out at the end of the year and the Town won’t have to pull money from reserves to be able to pay for police.
Looking into 2025, Kirkland says, “I think the big highlight is hopefully getting started on construction on the new town hall and then deciding on what’s going to go on, on the other half of town hall, because we’re only planning one half of it now in the beginning.”
He adds, “We want to hear from the public what they’d like to see in the other half. Do they want to see government services such as the library, the planning department, licence bureau, these are just things off the top of my head, all under one building.” He adds, maybe people want to see some recreation spaces in the other half. “Those are the answers we haven’t gotten yet but I’m looking forward to getting out there and finding out what the public wants to see,” says Kirkland.
