When it comes to talks between the City of Flin Flon and area cottagers, Mayor Cal Huntley isn’t closing the door on annexation.
“It’s not off the table. It’s on the back burner,” he says of the manoeuvre that would expand Flin Flon’s borders to encompass cottage country.
That said, Huntley rightly sees the need to modify how the city approaches the cottage issue.
He addressed the “city-cottage situation” during his mayoral campaign last fall, suggesting “personalities and positions” had “taken over the conversation.”
At the time, Huntley said he believed both sides could reach “a meaningful resolve” in “fairly short order,” agreeing on “something that works for both parties.”
That was probably never going to happen under the previous mayor and council. There was too much poison in the well.
In September 2014, I attended a North of 54 Cottage Owners Association meeting. The cottagers gathered to vote on what was presented as a 10-year deal with the city to provide fire protection and a no-annexation guarantee.
Nearly 200 cottagers were present. Exactly one of them voted in favour of charging year-round cottagers $650 a year and seasonal cottagers $250.
The situation was so confused by then that the cottagers and city could not even agree on whether a contract had been offered. Cottage association reps said yes and at least one city councillor said no.
Missteps
How did things turn so sour? Two grave missteps by the city come to mind.
In 2012, when the two sides began meeting, council asked cottagers to help pay for a range of municipal services. The list included $256.99 a year for each year-round cottager to fund the Flin Flon RCMP.
As cottagers quickly pointed out, the Cranberry Portage RCMP are actually responsible for policing the cabin subdivisions.
True, the city countered, but the Flin Flon RCMP were (at the time, at least) covering two-thirds of calls from cottagers. This was apparently due to staffing shortfalls in Cranberry Portage.
The city’s gripe was not with cottagers, but with the RCMP for so frequently sending Flin Flon-funded Mounties outside of their normal jurisdiction.
Simply put, it was absurd for the city to ask cottagers to pay for an internal rift with the RCMP over the use of resources.
This blunder certainly damaged the negotiations going forward by fostering suspicion on the part of some, if not many, cottagers.
Things only got worse in May 2014, when the public (to my knowledge) first learned of a letter the city had written to the Manitoba government a few months earlier.
In the letter, the city asked the province to amalgamate cottage country with Flin Flon in the same way that small southern Manitoba municipalities were forced to unite with neighbouring communities.
The province pointed out that the legislation under which municipalities were amalgamated had nothing to do with cottage subdivisions, so that particular concept swiftly perished.
Still, this was a groundbreaking step for the city to attempt without, I want to stress, any apparent public notice before the fact.
Yes, the previous council had made no secret of its willingness to (potentially) seek annexation if funding talks failed.
But the amalgamation request caught the cottagers with whom I spoke completely off guard, driving another wedge between them and the city.
Some cottagers say they are optimistic about talks resuming under the new mayor’s leadership. A number of them still want fire protection from the city, if for no other reason than it would allow them to secure 911 phone service.
Huntley may not be ruling out annexation, but he is wise to distance himself from the acrimonious talks of the past.
Local Angle runs Fridays.
