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New Tec: the fight for water underlies forced amalgamation

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In New Tecumseth
Oct 14th, 2010
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Not a ‘marriage of equals’
Editorial – New Tecumseth Free Press Online – October 13, 2010
New Tecumseth will turn 20 on January 1, 2011. Complaining about it is actually older, and continues unabated as if it happened yesterday. Whining started right after the provincial government of the day determined the only way to settle differences between the former Town of Alliston and the Township of Tecumseth and the former Village of Tottenham’s desire to annex land from Tecumseth, was to join them together. Beeton, being in the middle, serviced by an overflowing sewage lagoon and short of potable water, was thrown into the mix for its supposed own good.
What happened was in the mid 80s, Honda opened its first assembly plant in Canada built on potato fields that made a lot of local farming families rich afterwards. Those lands were in Tecumseth Township, but close enough to the Alliston boundary line, that it could tap into the urban services necessary to run a plant of such magnitude.
Because of the provincial and federal interest in Honda’s happiness, Alliston was forced to give over all its available water and waste water treatment allocation. The plant had to be expanded at a cost borne by Alliston ratepayers while the benefits were flowing to Tecumseth, collecting the property taxes Honda generated without having to provide the infrastructure to accommodate it. 
Alliston and Tecumseth councils bickered over future planning matters associated with Honda, couldn’t agree on a joint planning board, and the automaker, not a big fan of the squabbling, started making noises to the provincial government.
In the meantime, a landlocked Tottenham was making overtures to expand its ability to grow by eyeing developable land from Tecumseth to widen its urban bounds – think Barrie and Innisfil. Servicing constraints were also an issue in the former village that even today continues to hold-up development in conjuction with a weak economy.
In Beeton, the growing crisis was with water, and the looming notion that a community of about 3,000 people were about to be stuck with having to pay millions of dollars for an expensive water treatment plant because of high methane levels. At the other end, the sewage lagoons, now incorporated into the fine Mel Mitchell Field, were giving the Ministry of Environment fits because it could no longer handle all the toilets on line. It was an environmental mess.
Just prior to amalgamation the former Beeton council signed the contract with the province, and an original estimate of a couple million dollars, turned into more than $10 million, which led to Beeton residents forced to pay some of the highest water rates in Canada. That’s because each community paid for their own urban services during the early years. Today the McKelvey Well is a storage facility. A testament to a “white elephant” replaced with a pipeline from Alliston to Beeton.
The David Peterson government did not only target Alliston, Beeton, Tecumseth and Tottenham. They decided to restructure south Simcoe which got us New Tecumseth; Bradford West Gwillimbury; and Innisfil gobbling up Cookstown. (A second round a few years later created Adjala-Tosorontio and adjusted the line between New Tecumseth and Essa)
From 1990 to 1991 the councils from each community had representatives sit on the implementation committees trying to meld the municipalities together.
For the initial period, staff were all guaranteed jobs, which meant four sets of everyone and everything. And also four groups of opposition – they fought over everything meaning a lot of valuable time in the early days were squandered and sabotaged because of the side deals that were taking place behind closed doors.
The ‘gentlemen agreements’ were to not disrupt development deals that could otherwise unravel. One of these side deals led to the construction of the one million gallon water tower without an environmental assessment in Alliston that forced the Town to buy five Morrow Drive homes for about $1 million.
And in Tottenham, the village’s last council had an agreement with the Arvida development group that involved bridge financing for sewage plant expansion, in exchange for Arvida securing the largest percentage of the new allocation. That turned into an eventual mess with the plant under MOE orders to be decommissoned.
The fire departments were battling internally over control and money/pay; Alliston had its own police department, while Beeton, Tecumseth and Tottenham had 100 per cent subsidized OPP. Those two forces both fought to win the New Tecumseth policing contract which spilled over onto council because that’s who made the decision; a battle won by the OPP – and turned out to be the first such municipal contract in the province.
To draw this to a conclusion, amalgamation was never a mutual marriage between “equals.” It was a forced merger of four different communities, one of which, Alliston, was on a trajectory to grow residentially and commercially no matter what happened. Tecumseth would still be rural.
The question is, what would be different today in Beeton and Tottenham had they not been forced into the amalgamation? And, where would the money have come from to pay for these utopian and romantic ideals of what could have been? Sure, they’d have their own councils to decide their own fates, but fate’s not always cheap.
If the levy rate increases by one per cent for every $150,000 New Tecumseth has to raise from taxes spread across a population of 28,000 people, and commercial and industrial, imagine the math for a community of about 3,000 people like Beeton. And in the scheme of things, $150,000 doesn’t buy much any more.

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