Belleville Council will not be moving ahead with a proposal to realign the city’s ward boundaries from two to four.
Following an online public consultation period over the summer, which garnered less than 800 responses and plenty of back and forth discussion between councillors, the idea was lost by a 6-3 recorded vote on Monday evening.
Mayor Mitch Panciuk and Councillors Kelly McCaw and Bill Sandison voted in favour.
Councillors Carol Feeney, Chris Malette, Sean Kelly, Paul Carr, Garnet Thompson and Tyler Allsopp voted against.
Allsopp followed through on his promise in the spring to not support the change if there wasn’t enough public appetite for it, but adds that the majority of people who did give input, didn’t want the change either.
“It was unfortunately 59% (for) to 41% (against), so the people that did take the time to respond weren’t interested in switching to the new ward system. I certainly think there was a lot of reasonableness in the proposal, I think it’s an interesting idea and would be interested to reopening it down the road. But I felt that this time we needed to have the public engaged and we didn’t quite get there.”
Thurlow Councillor Sandison says while those who wanted the change weren’t all that vocal during the public input, the ward boundary issue goes back a couple of years, to when he was on the campaign trail.
“So the question was raised then and I said I would do what I could to bring forward changes to the existing ward system. So the fact that we’ve got to this point in time and had that discussion, I’m very pleased. I would have preferred a different outcome, but hey, I understand and I support the decision of council.”
Fellow Thurlow Councillor Paul Carr was one of a few councillors who thought the whole process had been mismanaged and was only being done for political advantage.
He tells Quinte News he’s glad the debate is over.
“I’m glad it’s put to bed. It’s divisive and that’s not what we need in our community, we need cohesion. The process was flawed from the start and a flawed process gets a flawed result, so I’m glad it’s out of the way, because it was just a pure mess.”
Mayor Panciuk had put forward the proposal in the first place and says despite the motion failing, he still thinks a realignment would benefit the city in the future.
“It would have been nice to have had everybody, in a respectful way, put forth their ideas but at the end of the day this is about equality of all residents. They should be treated the same way as they elect their city council. It’s also about removing barriers and making it easier for people to seek election. We say ‘anybody can run for office’ but obviously they’re not running for office and there’s a clear lack of representation from different parts of our demographics.”
Panciuk added that he doesn’t think the idea is completely dead, telling Quinte News that “as we get closer to the next election, it will come back up again as an issue”.
