Niagara Governance Discussions Highlight A Busy 2012 For Region

 By Doug Draper

It has been “the elephant in the room for years,” said Niagara Regional Chair Gary Burroughs, but this year the region’s council will face it head on.

Niagara, Ontario Regional Chair Gary Burroughs

The elephant Burroughs was referring to is “governance reform,” added Burroughs during his annual ‘State of the Region’ address to a large gathering in Thorold, Ontario this February 29, and it is “one of council’s top business plan initiatives.”

Though a potentially thorny and controversial issue,” he told the gathering hosted by the St. Catharines-Thorold Chamber of Commerce, “I strongly believe this exercise is about respecting our differences while maximizing our limited resources, and using them as effectively as we can for taxpayers, certainly. … but also for leveraging investment from public and private sectors.”

Burroughs said the issues around governance reform, which could focus on everything from which level of municipal government should operate what services to an amalgamation of local municipalities into one or more regional governments, “will require significant discussion (and) will undoubtedly elicit emotion and passion among elected officials and within the communities in which we live.”

Yet the first-term regional chair and former lord mayor of Niagara-on-the-Lake cautioned that “Niagara cannot become so focused on a singular issue that it keeps us from being innovative, proactive and accountable in all the other initiatives planned and underway.”

One of those initiatives, underway since last September, is the three-year n inter-municipal bus transit system the Region is piloting in cooperation with transit services in Welland, Niagara Falls and St. Catharines. The pilot has gotten off to a slow start with reports by some regional councillors and others of almost empty buses running between municipalities but Burroughs said has heard from chairs in other regions of the province that such systems take time to grow. He said he’s also heard from them that “a regionally-connected transit system … is a necessity for economic growth.”

Burroughs said it remains to be decided whether an inter-municipal transit system for the future will be run by the regional government, by a group of transit commissions for local municipalities, by the private sector or by some combination of private and public parties.

 “With the system now in place, the need (for transit for at least a segment of Niagara’s residents) has been met and will continue to grow,” Burroughs said. “A collaborative effort moving forward must ensure that the service continues, regardless of who might be providing that service in the years to come.”

You can read Niagara Regional Chair Gary Burroughs’s entire State of the Region address by clicking on  http://www.niagararegion.ca/chair/state-of-the-region-2012.aspx .

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