Wed. April 11 Comment

WFP criticizes  North Huron for cancelling the  meeting with Morris-Turnberry.

We agreed to meet with Morris-Turnberry, then later at County Council we hear Mayor Gowing coming up with a completely different scenario: He called for a county-wide fire service. In proposing this he states that they cannot get North Huron to negotiate.

We think there is no point in holding a meeting if we have no idea what  M-T wants to discuss.

Back in February we got  together to coordinate all of our many areas of cooperation most of which are functioning quite well. They said they weren't prepared to go along with a joint Economic Development process.

Next day, M-T announces they are going to create their own fire department by 2014. That told  us that they don't want to negotiate; they are going on their own. We thought, that's fine! Good Luck! They have every right to do that!

Then out of the blue they sent us a letter giving us three options. The letter says that this is their last effort at trying to negotiate with us. (We had not received any indication that they had asked to negotiate. We already have an agreement which runs for two years.)

The options amount to going back to a form of the old fire board system which NH pulled out of because it was failing to provide consistent and compliant fire service. In my view none of the options were acceptable.
Fire boards are no longer recognized by emergency authorities except for "grandfathered" boards.

Their plan would leave North Huron with high standard of service out of Blyth station for Blyth and M-T offered by FD of North Huron ; and a limited service out of the proposed Turnberry station to cover the Wingham and Turnberry areas provided by M-T Fire Dept. North Huron will never accept again two different level of service for our citizens.

We were prepared to meet with them to discuss matters at that point, although some councillors were skeptical about the value of discussing a set of really bad ideas. I think the main reason we thought that meeting should be a closed meeting was that we needed to sort out the question of what M-T really wanted to talk about. We all favoured an open meeting once we clarified the questions on which we could negotiate.

Then we heard the Mayor saying that he can't deal with us and that he wants to take another completely different tack: a county-wide fire service.

It just made no sense to have that meeting when we don't know what Morris-Turnberry wants to talk about and they don't seem to know either!