Our County

Who would like to look at some of the County issues and provide some content here? County & Education take up more than half of our total taxes. And County taxes keep spiraling out of control with no one paying attention.

Some possible issues:

Centre St Bottleneck:

Centre Street is a County Road.  It remains a bottleneck and despite numerous studies nothing gets done.  In the short term, traffic would be improved greatly by restricting left turns at busy times of day. This would, among other things, force school buses to use Bridge St rather than Graham. (At present, the crossing guard at Graham has to stop traffic to allow school buses to turn.)  Software and minor hardware improvements to the traffic signals at Dundas and Bridge would help too.

In the medium term, building a 2-way centre turn lane from Bridge to Isabella is an option, although an expensive one.  (This was done between Centre and Bridge with excellent results.)  Widening Centre St to 4 lanes is not feasible since numerous residences sit right on the street line.

In the long term, the County proposes a “third crossing” over the Napanee River west of Town. (See p. 191 of Town Official Plan for approx location.)  This will be very expensive, with bridges over CN and the river.  The location is questionable and it is unclear how it will connect to 401.  An alternative might be a new road east of Town connecting the Palace Road interchange to Hamburg Road east of Agoren Self Storage, thus avoiding the expensive river crossing. But, both options are decades in the future.

Official Plan:

The Province now requires Counties to have official plans too.  This may make sense in larger centers but it makes no sense at all here.  The County has dragged its feet and the good people in Queen’s Park are now threatening consequences if they don’t get moving.  So, the County budgeted $50,000 this year and hired Meridian, a planning consultant from Vaughan to generate over 100 pages which is now our draft OP .  It was considered by County Council on July 8 but has yet to be approved by the Ministry.

Even the Town planner, John Uliana, who made a presentation to Town council on June 23, agrees that this is a glorious waste of  time, effort and money, and done only to appease the gods in TO.   It will have negative consequences for new development. But, Queen’s Park knows best, so we have to do it.  Some planning consultant, somewhere, is thanking his mother for making him study geography.

MPAC:

This year the County will pay MPAC, a provincial agency, about $700,000 to assess the properties in Lennox and Addington County. For an average household that’s $32.28. Do we get value for our money? Okay, everyone knows we don’t.  MPAC is a total disaster. When was the last time they inspected a property in Greater Napanee?  Just look at the Ombudsman’s report MPAC in credibility crisis and Getting it Right.  But the County still has to pay for their service and there are no alternate service providers.  Should they complain to the Province?  Would it do any good? Or are the good people at Queens Park too busy ripping up floor boards to feed the fire to listen to our problems here?  Let us know what you think.

The New Center of Town:

At left are the County Welfare Office and the CAS building. Also in the immediate area are the fire hall, the police station and the County Ambulance Service.  All of these services were provided downtown a few years before amalgamation. Most of our tax dollars flow to these organizations.