There Is Far Too Much Secrecy Around Niagara Region’s Discussions On Where A New Police Headquarters Should Go

By Doug Draper

When it comes to the Niagara Regional Police Service and its plans for building a new police headquarters, any semblance of openness and transparency too often flies out the window for Niagara, Ontario’s regional council.

The Niagara Regional Police Service's existing headquarters in downtown St. Catharines. Photo by Doug Draper

For about the umpteenth time over the past two or three years, the doors to the regional government’s council chambers were closed to members of the media and general public this March 4 – this time for more than four hours. The doors were shut for so long that Cogeco’s Cable 10 media crew, which dutifully trains the eyes of their cameras on regional council proceedings for the public, finally packed up their gear and went home.

The optics of those doors remaining closed until members of the public finally get fed up and leave on Thursday council meeting nights are not good for a regional government that otherwise has a pretty decent record for openness.

And to swing those doors shut almost every time there is a discussion or debate over a police headquarters that would amount to one of the largest capital investment of our money the regional government is perched to make in its 40-year history is unacceptable.

The region has been drawing a curtain of secrecy around this issue for far too long now and it is about time members of the public began contacting their mayors and directly elected regional councillors and demanding some disclosure.

There are no doubt questions around the purchasing of property for a new headquarters and possibly personnel issues (involving some restructuring of NRP staff if and when the new headquarters is built), and these are matters, along with legal ones, that can be legitimately discussed behind closed doors under the Ontario Municipal Act. But it is getting harder and harder to believe that everything being discussed, for hours on end, in these closed door sessions needs to be kept secret.

When some of the councillors you tend to be most open when it comes to matters that involved the possibly expenditure of tens-of-millions of dollars of our money look at a reporter apologetically when asked for even a smitten of information about where the region is going on this one, something is a bit off here.

Some of us who’ve tried covering this have received only the thinnest of hints that the NRP and region may be looking at three or more possible sites in the region for the headquarters, at least one of them in Niagara Falls and possibly one in downtown St. Catharine’s in response to concerns the council in that city has raised about the economic impact of moving the present NRP headquarters out of its downtown.

Is there ever going to be a point in time in this process when the public that will be paying for all of this will have an opportunity to offer their views on which site might be the best for these facilities? Or is the region’s council simply going to open up the doors one day and tell us it has chosen one particular site for these facilities, and that is it?

Will these facilities go in a built-up urban center where provincial planning policies suggest they should go or are sites in an old cornfield or some other Greenfield somewhere out on the fringes of a community being considered? If so, and a Greenfield site outside an urban center is chosen by our elected officials for a public institution of such magnitude, how can they ever look private developers in the eye again and encourage them to adhere to planning principles that encourage growth closer to the core of our existing business and residential areas?

These are the kinds of questions and discussions our elected representatives should be holding in public. For a proposed development of the size and cost we are talking about here with this police headquarters, it is certainly one the taxpayers of this region should have some say in.

(Niagara At Large encourages you to share your thoughts on this matter in the comment boxes below and to click on http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest to residents across our binational Niagara region.)

Click on the following link to a Niagara Region website, then click on ‘councillor contact for a list of mayors and regional councillors and their contact information if you wish to share your views with them on this topic. The link is –  http://www.niagararegion.ca/government/council/default.aspx.