The vote was 7 to 4 against entering into an agreement by the 8 councilors of Haliburton County Council.

So why doesn’t that add up?

By-Law 3178 states – ‘County Council shall only use weighted votes for decisions involving financial matters’ and ‘Financial matters shall be defined to include the adoption of the annual operating and capital budgets, temporary and long-term borrowing, the acquisition of real property, the disposal of real property and the execution of contractual agreements including labour agreements. ‘

Reeve Fearrey stated that there would be increased enforcement needed from the one by-law officer and that made the issue a financial one. The rail trail by-law officer is on call for complaints and does not regularly patrol the rail trail. So the Reeves of Dysart and Minden Hills are then granted 3 and 2 votes respectively, the rest of council has only one vote.

Most of the other councilors were very surprised since Reeve Fearrey doesn’t often invoke this privilege and the financial impact to the county was minimal. Nonetheless, Warden Burton accepted the argument and allowed the weighted vote.

So what about the money? The NTC had sent a letter to the county about that and the county produced an email from the OFTR (July 2009) where we stated we would help regardless of the use agreement. The funding agreement was signed in September 2009 and ORMs were mentioned as a use and we should have clarified it then. We acted on good faith which seems to be a mistake.

There are currently complaints about ORMs on the trail that we offered to educate. We don't understand Reeve Fearrey's decision making process since he recently allowed ATVs access to his municipality’s roads stating ‘they are already doing it and we can’t enforce it so we might as well allow it’.

We also are in possession of a email from our opponents to county council from last week that seems defamatory towards the OFTR and OFTR staff so we are looking into that as well. It surely affected today’s vote.

The OFTR staff will research our options to pursue this. A legal stance might be costly and we do have areas we are allowed to use that may be a better serve by our resources. We would like the NTC to go after the county. They (NTC) have spoken to the CAO and they feel the matter can be resolved through better communication and more consultation.

We should have everything together for the OFTR Board of Directors within a couple of weeks so they can determine our best course for action. We may also survey our members to see if this is the issue where we take a stand. We have been working on this one for over 5 years.

Stay tuned….