By Cecilia Nasmith/Northumberland 89.7 FM/Today’s Northumberland
A controversial couple of days that saw the Town of Cobourg and the County of Northumberland at loggerheads over regulations to govern the county’s shelter at 310 Division St. has ended not with a bang but a whimper.
A sudden emergency Cobourg council meeting on Wednesday produced what Mayor Lucas Cleveland called “an olive branch.”
Tuesday’s all-day emergency county council meeting ended, after prolonged debate and examination of options, with a motion to try one more time to work with Cobourg to see how its concerns over liability might be addressed, and to give the effort five business days.
Chief Administrative Officer Jennifer Moore described thwarted attempts to have their four big concerns about the town’s Emergency Care Establishments bylaw addressed.
Conceivably the county could throw enough money to address requirements relating to extended areas of policing and litter pick-up, Moore said, but their liability regulations were concerning in the extreme. As she put it, county liability for operations extended to employees and councillors personally, while the town was indemnified from liability even if they did something on purpose.
Cobourg council held its own emergency in-camera meeting an hour prior to Tuesday’s council meeting, and then at 11:05 a.m. Wednesday, announced an emergency 4 p.m. meeting. It immediately went in camera and emerged for two minutes at 5 p.m. to announce the results.
Councillors passed the motion that was produced – to authorize Chief Administrative Officer Tracey Vaughan to send a letter in response to the letter received by the CAO of Northumberland County, and copy Mayor Lucas Cleveland and Cobourg council on the response, and further that council authorize the Municipal Law Enforcement and Licensing Manager and town solicitors to meet with county staff “to discuss the topics raised in the correspondence noted above and shall not discuss the outstanding bylaw exemption appeal requested by Northumberland County under the ECE By-law.”
By 5:02 p.m., the meeting was adjourned with Cleveland’s parting words.
“Thank you very much, council, for finding a way forward and working to find an olive branch so that we can move past this impasse towards resolution,” the mayor said.
