Quaiff leading group of delegates to AMO

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Prince Edward County Mayor Robert Quaiff will lead a group of delegates from the municipality to Ottawa on Sunday for the annual Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s (AMO) 2018 Conference in Ottawa.
Quaiff and a team of councillors and municipal staff will join 1,900 other participants from across the province at Ontario’s largest municipal conference from Aug. 19 – 22. For more than a century, AMO brought together municipal, provincial and federal officials to work collectively to overcome municipal challenges and plan for the future.
Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford, Minister of Municipal Affairs Steve Clark, and the three party leaders are featured speakers and several additional provincial ministers will participate in the conference.
The annual conference provides municipal officials to discuss and move forward on shared challenges, to learn, and to create new opportunities that can benefit their communities. In addition to the conference program, municipal staff and officials will take part in municipal delegation meetings with provincial and federal ministries.
Quaiff will be meeting with the education minister Lisa Thompson and MPP Stephen Lecce, parliamentary assistant to the minister of infrastructure. He said he welcomes the opportunity to discuss school closures.
“It will give us an opportunity to discuss rural school amalgamations and closures with the new minister because it’s a real concern here,” he said. “During the election the (Progressive Conservative) party said it would uphold the moratorium on school closures until the closure review process is reformed and as i said, County residents are quite concerned about the future of rural schools.”
Key session topics include cannabis legalization, trade, indigenous relations, climate change and disaster preparedness, waste diversion, ambulance dispatch, emerging technologies and Smart Cities, the 2018 municipal election, rural economic development, and much more.
Quaiff is particularly interested in sessions related to infrastructure, affordable housing, indigenous relations, education, and rural economic development.
He said the municipality wasn’t successful in getting a sit-down meeting with Ministry of
Transportation officials, but will be discussing a number of topics during their time with Lecce.
“We’ll be able to tell him about the challenges we face due to our ongoing infrastructure deficit and we want to express our concerns and at the same time, learn about the new government’s plan for adjusting the physical challenges local municipalities face.
“In particular we want to remind the government of the importance of investing in social housing in rural areas. Much of our current stock of social housing is aging and is in really high need of repair or replacement and we have a shortage, so we need to have that conversation.”
County Road 49 will also be on the table when Quaiff and his team meet with Lecci. Quaiff, who will step down after the October municipal election said if Prince Edward County does not receive government funding for the repair of one of the main entranceways to the municipality it will be a huge burden for the next council during budget deliberations.
“We can’t ignore it because it’s in such an unsafe state that liability claims will start to roll in because someone is going to get hurt sooner or later,” he said. “Trust me, they look at how many people come down that road to go to their provincial park. People that pay an entrance fee, people that pay to camp — it’s in their best interest to make sure that road is safe.”
AMO is a non-profit organization representing almost all of Ontario’s 444 municipal governments.
bbell@postmedia.com

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