Township has spent $500,000 on paperwork for two projects that have gone nowhere fast

LAURIE WEIR

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming.

Raises hand.

Yes, I sure did.

Rideau Lakes Mayor Arie Hoogenboom’s decision to veto the Chantry office retrofit project shouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s been opposed to it from the start.

A major capital project, years in the making, is halted before a cost analysis has been completed. Emotions are high. Tempers are flaring. But frankly, it feels premature. He should have waited until the estimates came in, not stopped the process in the middle of the most important factor in this decision: what it’s going to cost compared to a new build.

We may never know now, thanks to this premature veto.

Remind you of anything? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Let’s rewind to January 2023, when council met in a special session to review final designs and funding models for the proposed Portland municipal hub. It was a more-than-$8.2 million project that included a hall, library and municipal offices.

At that point, 90 per cent of the architectural work was complete. More than $365,000 had already been spent. But with Cathy Livingston’s seat vacant after her death in December 2022 and full council not present, four councillors voted no: Sue Dunfield, Deborah Anne Hutchings, Jeff Banks and Linda Carr. Their concerns ranged from affordability to democratic fairness.
(Ron Pollard, Marcia Maxwell, Joan Delaney and the mayor were in favour of the build.)

The result? A tie vote. And in municipal government, a tie is a defeat.

Since then, a scaled-down hall and library was built in Portland for under $3 million. The township had to build something, having already demolished the old hall in hopes the hub would replace it. With a new full council — Paula Banks was elected in the byelection that spring — the hall and library project moved forward and opened in May of this year. Beautiful.

The majority of council has since moved to proceed with costing for a renovation of the Chantry municipal offices. Drawings are over 90 per cent finalized, and they were set to receive updated cost comparisons, including a potential new build on a different property.

Now, the Chantry retrofit, estimated at $4.5 million, is on pause after the mayor used Ontario’s strong mayor powers to veto the May 12 confirmatory bylaw that would have sent it to tender. That price is still below where the Portland hub was headed. That was a project he was gung-ho about and had positioned as the flagship item in his 2022 re-election mandate.

The township has already spent $135,000 on design work for Chantry. Add that to the $365,000 spent on the Portland hub, and Rideau Lakes has sunk roughly half a million dollars into professional fees and plans for two projects: one that never got built, and another that’s dangerously close to becoming a ghost.

That’s a half-million bucks, folks. Poof.

That’s not strategic planning, it’s fiscal whiplash.

We don’t even have a final cost analysis yet. There are no comparators for a new build versus a retrofit. Does the mayor know something the rest of council doesn’t?

The stakes are higher now. Thanks to new provincial legislation, the mayor’s veto can only be overturned with a two-thirds majority. That means six of eight councillors must vote in favour of moving forward with the costing component of the renovation.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Right now, five councillors support the Chantry office project. That leaves two potential swing votes: Marcia Maxwell and Ron Pollard. If they wait long enough, there could be a newcomer with fresh eyes on the situation in the form of a newly elected councillor.

Both Maxwell and Pollard supported the Portland hub in 2023, which was a much more expensive plan. They, along with former councillor Joan Delaney, who recently resigned her seat, supported the mayor’s vision for a consolidated municipal facility in Portland. The aforementioned byelection is slated for June 26. Now, they’ve voted against the Chantry retrofit.

Has anything changed? Have fiscal priorities shifted? Are they simply following the mayor’s lead? Or is the issue less about cost and more about who’s driving the project?

These are the questions Rideau Lakes needs answered before the next regular council meeting on June 3, when the Chantry renovation project veto is expected to return for debate. Once formally announced, council will have 21 days to block the veto.

(This is starting to feel like an episode of Big Brother.)

Incidentally, a special meeting of council was called late Monday. It will be held on May 28 at 12:30 p.m. This is the only item on the agenda.

In his formal “Mayoral Decision MD-2025-01-a,” Hoogenboom argued that retrofitting the Chantry office is inconsistent with provincial housing goals. He says infrastructure dollars should go toward roads and projects that support residential development, not toward office space in a non-growth hamlet.

I am a Chantry-ite. Is that a word? A “non-growth hamlet”? A-hem.

But this veto didn’t come out of nowhere. It landed just four days after the majority of council, which includes the five who support the retrofit, voted to oppose strong mayor powers and fund a provincewide legal challenge. That motion passed in the absence of Hoogenboom, Maxwell and Pollard.

Rideau Lakes is back in familiar territory, deep into planning and deeper into costs.

Maybe the next $500,000 should go toward building consensus, not blueprints.