Should small towns pay for policing? This town doesn't think so

Mattawa’s council wants Ford to pay for the OPP.

Specifically, the town is asking the provincial government to foot the OPP bill for small, rural communities of 10,000 people or less. Councillors passed a motion to this effect, and copies are in the mail to Premier Doug Ford, the Solicitor General, the Minister of Finance, and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

The motion, which passed unanimously, will also be sent to all 444 municipalities in Ontario.

“It is apparent that the Ontario government has overlooked the needs of small rural Ontario,” Mayor Raymond Bélanger detailed, reading the motion to council before the vote. The motion continued to outline how our province’s small rural municipalities “face insurmountable challenges” trying to fund maintenance and capital costs.

Operating needs “consume the majority of property tax revenue sources,” the mayor noted, and small communities like Mattawa face “monumental infrastructure deficits that cannot be adequately addressed through property tax revenue alone.”

To lighten the load, mayor and council are asking the government to pay for all “small rural non-contract” OPP services. The cost would be “approximately $428 million,” the motion details.

Given that “the Ontario Government has committed $9.1 billion to Toronto alone to assist with operating deficits and the repatriation of the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway,” Mattawa feels this is a reasonable request to help smaller municipalities.

The request for OPP funding would “afford relief to small rural municipalities,” the motion details, “for both infrastructure needs while having a minimal impact on the Provincial budget, which rang in this year at $214 billion, with a projected $9.8 billion deficit.

Mattawa’s motion calls on the province to “immediately implement sustainable funding” for small rural municipalities “by reabsorbing the cost of the Ontario Provincial Police back into the Provincial budget with no cost recovery to municipalities.”

David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.