County Council debated the issue of the County Facility at 310 Division St in Cobourg on October 16th and as usual it was the Mayor of Cobourg against the rest of Council.

There are two accounts of the meeting; one written by Cecilia Naismith here and one written by Cobourg News here. To sum up the Mayor of Cobourg and his Staff are withholding the license needed to operate the facility and although the opening of the warming shelter is scheduled for this Friday the rest of the building is not.

Apparently a long discussion took place about the problem of obtaining the license from the Cobourg Staff. The Staff rejected the applications made by the County, in fact the first application was not even considered by Cobourg but flat out rejected. The County came back and that application is asking for four exemptions to the bylaw. The Town could not agree to those requests and the situation is in limbo and the County Staff came to the Council to ask for guidance.

The four conditions yet to be agreed on are:

• Security is required outside Transition house within a 500 metre radius
• Transition house is responsible for waste and debris from clients within a 500 metre radius
• Application did not use the Town form to avoid misinformation. This allowed changes in wording to do with indemnity but meant denial of the application by Cobourg
• Requirement for personal liability of County staff for compliance

The County staff pointed out that these conditions are not only onerous but dubiously legal. Obviously common ground cannot be found. That leaves the question – what next?

If the bottom floor of the facility can be used the warming centre and the supports for the residents are available. The second floor residential components cannot be used. The legal problems must be overcome to make the situation moral.

The debate was unresolved, the County passed a motion to appeal the license denial quote from CobourgNews –  “But other than Lucas, Councillors did not like the conditions. So after a lot of discussion, Council  voted to appeal the contentious conditions and added the requirement that a representative of Cobourg Staff appear before County Council. Lucas said that the County was audacious to ask and that it was inappropriate.  In the recorded vote, Lucas voted against and Olena abstained.”

Obviously the Mayor of Cobourg felt he was once again being picked on because ‘nobody listens to me, and they don’t like me’ (an opinion noted in a recent podcast with Rob Washburn) and again leads the charge against the move to rehouse the homeless. But with the eviction of the encampment population and the cold weather coming this attitude will backfire as the realisation that there is a facility ready to be used but he is stopping it opening.

If the requirement of the Town is to make the County responsible for the litter and vagrancy problems from Lake Ontario to Spencer St. (that’s the 500 metre radius) is a common sense move as opposed to an impossible condition designed to prohibit the operation of 310 Division then we cannot see it. If the requirement to make all the people at the County personally liable for the actions of the homeless moved to 310 Division is legally binding then we cannot see it. If the County has to be responsible for the security in the 500 metre radius – Lake Ontario to Spencer St. when they are not allowed to police outside of the building that is obviously a legal problem.

In conclusion, as we said when the bylaw was written, it is a sloppy and a dubiously legal document that makes any operation of 310 Division St null and void. If that is the case then all of the anticipated problems of a drug fuelled homelessness crisis is back on the Mayor. He has to ask himself just who looks stupid here, him for refusing to work with anybody to solve the crisis, or the County for trying and in his mind failing, to fix the problem.