A delegation to County Council on April 18 will ask Council to have emergency plans for the possibility that flooding from high water levels on Lake Ontario could happen again.  This may be aggravated by the recently implemented Plan 2014 which allows extreme lake levels to be 2.4 inches higher than previously.  The issue affects property owners in both the U.S. and Canada who have a Lake Ontario waterfront so they have formed a group called United Shoreline Ontario. The presentation talks at length about Plan 2014 and implies that it was a bad decision but the reason for it was to allow for greater variation in lake levels to help coastal wetlands.  The level in Lake Ontario is managed… Read complete articleConcerns about High Lake levels Occurring Again

At last Monday’s council meeting, Northumberland County CAO Jennifer Moore and Treasurer Glenn Dees presented the annual County Financial report.  They listed accomplishments, talked about upcoming priorities and gave a good summary of the county budget with highlights (see link below for the full presentation).  The financial summary was simpler and easier to understand than previously provided.  Major Projects for the next 10 years were listed, allocation of tax dollars was spelled out and the split in sources of funding was shown.  In reporting on waste management, Jennifer said work was being done in preparation for the introduction in 2019 of collection of a third type of waste – garbage that could be composted.  Details are still being worked out… Read complete articleCounty Report to Cobourg Council

Until recently, Transition House provided housing for people in Northumberland who were in emergency situations – or otherwise simply homeless.  But on December 5, 2017 a client assaulted a worker and caused “considerable structural damage” to the premises so it was closed December 22 – supposedly temporarily.  The County is responsible for social services so they organized alternative emergency shelter – I understand in conjunction with the Salvation Army, Cobourg Police and others.  News is sparse – seemingly because of a decision to not provide information to the media – but separately the County is now making public their plans to provide a new Emergency Shelter System. In mid 2017 a consultant was hired to review housing the homeless so… Read complete articleHomelessness Plan for Northumberland

Taxes for both the Town and the County are spread amongst classes (categories) using ratios.  Residential has a base of 1.0, so if a class has a ratio less than 1.0, then for a given valuation, taxes will be less.  As an example, the farm ratio is 0.25 so valuations of farms will be 4 times that of a residence for the same tax. But “multi-residential” was previously set at 2.2160 and “industrial” class was set at 2.6300 so their taxes were more than double for the same valuations. However, both multi-residential and industrial were deemed to be too high so will now be lowered to 2.0000 and 2.4800 respectively for 2018 taxes.  This means that taxes for multi-residential will… Read complete articleCounty Reduces Tax on Apartments

At the County Council meeting on January 24, MTO made a presentation that described traffic, accidents, closures, snow clearing, maintenance goals and construction projects.  It generally covered the Eastern Region which extends from Port Hope through Northumberland to the Quebec border.  The MTO does not get much publicity so I have listed below the highlights of the presentation as they affect Northumberland.  But they do try to keep us informed with their kiosks at ONRoute service Stations, using a Twitter account and various web sites.  Kathryn Moore from the Ministry of Transportation made the presentation.  The photo shown below was originally captioned as being in Toronto – but I’m not sure which highway it is nor even if it’s MOT… Read complete articleMTO Reports to County on 401 in Winter