By Doug Draper
Niagara, Ontario’s top municipal politician will not be seeking another term on the regional council.
Niagara Regional Chairman Peter Partington announcing decision not to seek another term of office.
“Tonight’s meeting is important for a number of reasons,” said Peter Partington after he and other councillors were escorted into the region’s council chambers by a lone piper on Thursday, Jan. 21. “It’s the first meeting of a new year in this last year of this term of council. It’s also the first meeting of (the Niagara regional government’s) 40th anniversary year – truly a year to celebour and many achievements and the difference the region has made in the lives of our resident and in the health and vibrancya of our communities.”
“And it is the first meeting in what will be my final year as your chairman and as a member of regional council.”
With that 70-year-old Partington will be taking off his chain of office at the end of the council’s term this coming December after what will be eight years at the regional helm and 16 years after he was first elected to the region’s council for the City of St. Catharines.
But Partington, a lawyer who also served Niagara as a provincial member of parliament for the Conservative Party in the 1980s, has no intentions of coasting his way through the remainder of the term.
He said he plans to use his final year pursuing several initiatives, including three he said are particularly high on his agenda. They included establishing an inter-municipal transit system for Niagara, building and promoting Niagara as a “strategic gateway and border crossing” between Canada and the United States, and “developing a strategy to enhance Niagara’s waterfronts and improve public access to our lakes and rivers where opportunities present themselves.”
The first of those three initiatives – a region-wide transit system – has been a vision of at least some councillors over all the years regional government in Niagara has been in existence and may finally get the support of a majority on council when it holds a special meeting on transit on Jan. 28.
The third initiative has been a topic of concern and controversy over the past few years with proposals on the books by private developers to build shoreline condos in Wainfleet where the old Easter Seals Park once operating and near the waterline of Fort Erie’s Bay Beach.
Partington said he also wants to hopefully resolve issues over facilities, including a new headquarters for the Niagara Regional Police Service before the year is over and launch a strategy for diverting 65 per cent or more of Niagara’s household waste away from landfills through recycling and other means.
The decision by Partington not to seek another term paves the way for a wide open race for the regional chair’s position following next fall’s municipal elections. The region’s existing bylaws require those elected to council to vote for candidates within their own ranks for the position.
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