Fort Frances councillors are tasking administration to report on the future of Sunny Cove Camp and other revenue generating activities for the town following a series of notices of motion raised by coun. Kaleb Firth.
At Monday night’s meeting of town council, three motions originally introduced by Firth at their November 12, 2024, meeting were brought before council. Notices of motion are described by the town’s Procedural By-Law as the mechanism by which a member of council may introduce a new matter to council proceedings. The notices are read at that meeting and then placed on the agenda for the following meeting, where council may choose to consider it, so long as the member who initially raised the motion is in attendance.
Of Firth’s three motion, the first, “THAT council direct Administration to present a report for possible municipal annex options,” was not seconded by another member of council and so failed without discussion.
Firth’s remaining motions, however, garnered discussion from other council members. The second of the three motions, “THAT council direct Administration to present a report on long-term viable options for Sunny Cove camp,” was seconded by mayor Andrew Hallikas. Firth noted he raised the motion in order to help determine the future viability of the Sunny Cove Camp property, which he saw as an opportunity for the town to generate further revenue.
“As we’ve seen since the capital budget meeting that we’ve recently had, we’re starting to have to look at finding ways to either save money or find new ways to generate new revenue,” Firth said.
“I know that we have some big commitment in the capital budget towards Sunny Cove, and I think that, yes, COVID has slowed down that project significantly, and we’ve had struggle with finding RFPs. So I’d like to find a way to have a report generated on what we could actually do with that property, and see if that fits within the service levels that we’re trying to provide as a municipality.”
Coun. Wendy Brunetta echoed Firth’s comments, noting she felt there should be ways to expand the revenue-generating options for Sunny Cove in the future, once the town has finished necessary renovations to the buildings on the property.
Town of Fort Frances CAO Marcel Michaels noted that he and Town of Fort Frances recreation and culture manager Nathan Young have discussed Sunny Cove, and expressed he felt it would be difficult to have a report on the property back to council for the 2025 season, as restorative work is expected to be ongoing during that time.
“We think it’ll be challenging to have something in place for the 2025 season,” Michaels said.
“So that gives us a little bit of latitude that, if we want to look at management options as one of the options included of what to do with Sunny Cove, something by Q2 2025 in order to have something in place executed so we could have, hypothetically, a proponent in place, managing it as one option, where that would be our target. So give us four or five months, have a detailed report on all the options that we could have; divesting ourselves from it, from a third party running it, from the municipality running it. This is a pretty substantive report on what those costs will be to the community if we were to be the proponent to actually run all the services through there. So our target date would be something for 2026 to be started, but the report, in order for council to deliberate, Q2 2025 at the latest is what I thought.”
With Young expressing some caution over adding too much to administrations workload in regards to substantial reports, Marcel concluded that even giving town staff to the end of summer 2025 to provide their report would still result in almost six months to take action on any possibilities and have an operable plan in place by Spring 2026, when the property is expected to be back online. However, he noted there are still questions to be answered.
“We’re well aware that council is investing $700,000 to rehabilitate sunny Cove,” he said.
“Money to Russell Hall, bringing that up to a standard where it could be operational. Now we have a capital component that we put money into that will actually allow things to be done there. Now the problem is, what things will be done? Who will manage it? Kiwanis is no longer at the table to manage it. Will it be the Town? Will it be a third party? What are those options? We’re investing good money, so that’s why I think this is a great motion in order to give us direction, to bring forward something to tie into the $700,000 that has rehabilitated the Sunny Cove area.”
Firth stressed his motion on Sunny Cove was to recognize the property as a municipal asset that carries a good deal of meaning and nostalgia for those in town, and wanted to make sure the town “get this as right as possible” when it came to securing its future.
Finally, council discussed Firth’s final motion, “THAT council direct Administration to present a high-level report on revenue generating activities, Examples: photo radar, tolls, grants.” As the motion did not mention a specific timeframe for the return of the indicated report, coun. Mike Behan sought clarification from Firth, with coun. John McTaggart expressing concern over tasking administration with another intensive report to prepare, especially as he expressed he felt administration was already doing good work in seeking out new sources of revenue on the regular.
Firth expressed a desire to see a report before council for Q3 or Q4 of 2025, and said he left his request broad in order to get as high-level a view as council could in order to try and discover new areas that had the potential for generating revenue that had otherwise been overlooked.
“I want to see what we can do that that we aren’t currently doing,” Firth said.
“I’m not going to pretend that I know what we’re doing when it comes to generating new revenue sources. That said, I do find that our ratepayers are under a lot of pressure. We’re going to see that when the operation budget comes up. I’m just trying to find a way that we can start bridging some of those gaps. The pressure that’s going to be happening this tax year isn’t sustainable for a lot of people in our community, and I want to be an advocate to try and find a way to make things just a little bit easier, and if it’s by asking administration to put a report together discussing what happens in other municipalities, or finding ways to make things a little bit more affordable, I think that should be one of our priorities moving forward.”
While Firth’s motion specifically mentioned photo radar as one of the components administration should look into, Michaels expressed some concern with its inclusion, noting photo radar is “a political decision” that council would have to specifically direct administration to look into.
“Although we’re always looking for ways to create money, we wouldn’t just go to council and hand deliver photo radar. That’s a political decision. That’s a sort of a direction from administration to choose. It’s well known that if you want to generate extra revenue, photo radar could. Now the premise is, it should be based on safety… so I wouldn’t anticipate administration ever on its own, doing photo radar and just bringing it to you. This would be a conversation generally, through strat plans and discussions like that we would get a sense… The grant component we can do internally, I truly believe that. We have a great staff that’s done great work, and we’re shifting our focus. Manager Rob and myself spoke before, water is a big issue. Now we might target more water grants like he does for roads and and things of that nature. So combining those two… you’re putting in grants and photo radars, two very big different things. One we’re going to do by ourselves, photo radar we won’t touch.”
In the end, council moved to remove the mention of photo radars from Firth’s motion, instead turning it into a request for a high-level report on revenue-generating activities by Q3 of 2025.
