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Sundridge Mayor Lyle Hall believes merger talks between his municipality and the townships of Strong and Joly are dead.

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But Mayor Strong Kelly Elik and Joly Mayor Tim Bryson disagree.

Hall believes the talks reached an impasse when the Strong council rejected a lengthy resolution that would move the talks forward.

Strong defeated the resolution by a 5–0 vote at a tri-council meeting, while Joly and Sundridge passed the resolution.

After the vote, Strong’s board said it wanted to introduce two merger-related resolutions, but Hall opposed them, saying the resolutions were not part of the agenda.

“Why do we have rules? Hall asked. “You don’t slip (something) at the last minute.”

Hall wanted to know why Strong had not submitted the two resolutions a few days before the agenda was prepared so that all elected officials could read them beforehand.

Although Bryson said the procedural bylaws could be suspended to allow the resolutions to be read, Strong opted to wait until the next tri-council meeting to present his motions.

Municipalities currently have six shared service agreements and part of the voted down resolution was to review these agreements.

“When Strong said he didn’t want to address the service agreements or the increased costs of running those agreements, well, that’s it,” Hall told The Nugget after the meeting.

“There will be no amalgamation with this particular Sundridge council.”

Hall added that the six shared services agreements will continue even though they are outdated and incomplete and need to be updated due to rising costs.

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Elik doesn’t think the merger talks are over.

Municipalities take turns hosting tri-council sessions, and Elik says Strong is hosting the next tri-council meeting.

“I would like to send an open invitation to the other two municipalities and present the resolutions that we wanted to propose,” Elik said.

“We are too late this term to start anything, but I would like to have all the facts available so next term can have an informed discussion on whether to move forward or not.”

Bryson also wants to pursue the merger.

He wrote a discussion paper that shows the benefits of the merger far outweigh the drawbacks.

He plans to develop this document further and said that once he is comfortable with the end result, he will “put it on a public platform for all taxpayers to see.”

One element of Bryson’s discussion paper calls for turning a task force created years ago on amalgamation into a committee that includes staff from all three municipalities so it can review provincial funding to study amalgamation.

This is also a point Bryson brought up at the tri-council meeting. He noted that merger talks between the municipalities have been going on for years.

And Hall wanted deadlines created to move the process along.

“Even if the merger doesn’t happen, at least we looked into it instead of talking about it,” Hall said.

Hall is a big proponent of amalgamation, saying it’s easier to make decisions under one municipality.

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Bryson circulated a draft of his discussion paper to council members and the Strong Coun. Marianne Stickland said she was not opposed to the newspaper’s content “on some articles I have a difference of opinion”.

She did not specify where the differences lay.

She agrees that service agreements need to be updated.

She suggested that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing guide the three communities so that the decision to go ahead with the merger is based on facts.

Stickland stressed that everyone should have a say in whether the three municipalities become a single entity, including all residents.

Stickland also said Strong had several conditions that needed to be guaranteed.

“In our case our residents cannot and will not lose through the process. That is the first guarantee,” Stickland said.

“And the staff will not lose their jobs. There will be no job losses. »

Stickland said another safeguard was that any municipality could opt out of the merger until the day of the merger, even if the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing approved the merger.

She said Strong was interested in pursuing the merger, but the guarantees he wanted would be deal breakers.

“The merger will cost nothing or negatively impact our residents,” she said.

“That’s the main priority. The minute it happens, we don’t know we’re in it anymore.

Hall said the conditions Strong was on after creating a scenario where the merger talks fail.

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He believes the merger is best for the three municipalities.

He says services would increase, but he couldn’t say taxes wouldn’t increase, although he thinks with the merger there would be fewer tax increases.

Hall called the current state of the merger “messy” and he didn’t like it.

Despite his personal feelings, Hall said one thing he would never do is ask the Ontario government to force the three municipalities to merge.

Hall says Sundridge would merge with Joly in a heartbeat without Strong if he could.

But that’s not possible because Sundridge is surrounded by Strong and Hall says that under provincial rules a municipality cannot jump over another municipality to get to a third community.

Rocco Frangione is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works at the North Bay Nugget. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.