DRYDEN – His city’s policing costs are rising, but Dryden Mayor Jack Harrison says he found reasons for optimism in a recent meeting with Ontario’s solicitor general.
Harrison and Kenora Mayor Andrew Poirier met with Michael Kerzner in Toronto on Nov. 30 to discuss Ontario Provincial Police bills that eat up large portions of their cities’ operating budgets.
“It was a good meeting that Mayor Poirier and myself had with Mr. Kerzner,” Harrison said Friday.
“Mr. Rickford was in attendance as well,” he added, referring to Kenora–Rainy River MPP Greg Rickford.
The province has a program in the works, with details to come out next year, that “will help out communities across the Northwest,” Harrison said.
About 40 per cent of the City of Dryden’s tax revenue is spent on policing, he said.
The city’s draft operating budget for 2024 includes a nearly 13 per cent increase in OPP annual billing. Dryden’s switch from a municipal police force to OPP service in 2022 has been more expensive than originally projected.
Harrison said he’s confident that “our costs will be reduced substantially” once Dryden’s “transition billing period” for OPP service ends in 2025 and the city starts paying according to the regular billing model applied to other municipalities
“We’re quite happy with the OPP service, but just the impact of the transition costs as well as the inflation of the cost of doing business really hit us pretty hard,” he said.
The mayors had “a substantive conversation” with Kerzner in a meeting that ran for almost an hour, Poirier said Friday.
“Having the meeting with him for that amount of time was encouraging,” he said.
Poirier said he spoke with Kerzner by phone on Friday and was assured that the provincial government is “working on some solutions right now.”
The two mayors also met with Minister of Long-Term Care Stan Cho and his staff on the issue of funding for district Homes for the Aged.
Kenora and Dryden want people in unincorporated communities to pay their fair share into those district long-term care homes, Harrison said.
Currently, he said, unincorporated communities don’t pay anything into the long-term care homes, though their residents “have equal access based on priority needs. So we’re asking Mr. Cho to correct that funding model.”
