Huntsville candidates eyeing the mayoral seat talk about hospitals

There were a lot of promises and assertions of what they would do if elected, but nothing seemed to set the candidates apart more than when asked how they would try to raise the local share of two new hospital builds, which for all intense and purposes is sitting at a moving target of $74M as per 2019 dollars, Huntsville council was recently told.

Below you’ll find what the candidates had to say on the issue of setting committing to set aside funds for the local share of building two new hospitals – one in Bracebridge and one in Huntsville. The order of their responses was determined by a draw at the beginning of the forum.

Steve Hernen, who held the position of director of operations and protective services as well as fire chief with the Town and has rentals in Huntsvile and recently built affordable housing in the municipality, said there are two ways of coming up with the funds. Through District of Muskoka taxation and a local component. “I would get the leadership team back together from the communities around us, we’d agree on what our local share is and how we divide it up. But Huntsville has some money and I don’t think we need to go into the taxpayers’ pocket again for that.” Hernen said the Town has $3.6M tucked away from the sale of the Waterloo building, which is bringing the municipality about $300,000 annually in interest alone. “We just need to earmark that reserve for the hospital share,” he said, and also spoke of the property currently being leased by INFRA Pipe Solutions Ltd., also known as the KWH property. He said there is a 15-year lease on that municipally-owned property and the company pays the Town over $400,000 a year to lease it. “Which right now is being tucked away in a reserve account. So the municipality has the well within and the capability of coming up with $10M, and if I’m allowed to represent you, we will commit to that in the first 12 months of my term,” he told those present at the Algonquin Theatre on September 29, at the mayoral candidate forum.

Reuben Pyette-Bouillon the owner of a taxi service in town who is running for Mayor of Huntsville along with his spouse, Shawn Bouillon, who is running for the Chaffey Ward, said they were discriminated against for being gay and Métis men when the municipality refused to allow them to operate a taxi dispatch company from their Chaffey Township Road property. They took their planning issue to the Ontario Land Tribunal, which recently ruled in their favour. He said $74M is a lot of money. “We have a good hospital. Our hospital is well staffed. Our plant is well taken care of. We utilize our hospital space poorly. We’ve got a wing full of offices where we should have a wing full of beds,” said Pyette-Bouillon, recognizing that the number of beds is provincially mandated. “We need a hospital 15, 20 years from now and we can certainly reach those goals. There’s certainly equipment issue with our hospital, and that equipment issue needs to be resolved. Our equipment is old but overall our hospital is excellently staffed, it has wonderful doctors and I don’t think we need to be building a hospital at this point.”

Tim Withey, who ran for mayor of Huntsville in the past unsuccessfully and currently sits as Huntsville District councillor and owns an insurance company in town said he has experience on the subject. “So, this is something I know a little about having been on the North Simcoe Muskoka LHIN board when a lot of these applications were coming in,” he said, referring to the now defunct Local Health Integration Networks replaced by Premier Doug Ford with health teams made up primarily of health care providers such as hospitals, family doctors, and home care providers under a single, provincial super agency. Withey said he is glad the question of whether to build one or two hospitals is over but said getting to this stage of the planning process has taken over ten years. He said if the hospitals are built, it’ll be another ten years “if not further into the distance,” he added. “So if they’re looking at a build price of $600M now, that’s just going to balloon. New technologies will make that go up. Building hospitals are very expensive per square foot, and for a population total of, Muskoka now, the District is, about 70,000 people so… it’s a bit of a stretch to think that this will ever happen, quite frankly,” said Withey.

“I think our hospitals should be renovated and better equipped and better staffed now, which is what we need today. I don’t have a problem putting away a little bit of money to satisfy the ball to keep rolling but I’m a bit skeptical, you know, having been on the LHIN about how this works. Some of our reserves aren’t just stashed away, they are there for a reason. For example, the $400,000 we get from Uponor [INFRA Pipe Solutions] is put into a reserve to take care of any potential future environmental issues of that site.”

Nancy Alcock, who sits on both Huntsville and District’s planning committees and is currently serving as Deputy Mayor of Huntsville, said everyone realizes the importance of the hospitals and coming up with the local share is seen by some as downloading responsibility by the Province, yet failure to commit will stop the application. “And I don’t think anybody wants that.” She said staff has been asked to return with a report about options for the local share. She said at the Town level, a special hospital levy could be instituted, “and in doing that the first year could be quite painful but if we start contributing year over year [and]people become used to it, let’s say you have a 1 per cent levy and would amount to about $2.5M in 15 years.” She also said if the municipality, which is a shareholder in Lakeland Power, were to invest its annual dividend, it could generate $15M over 15 years. She said development fees could also be used towards the local share of the hospital build. “The key is to make the commitment and develop the process,” she said.

Withey responded to Alcock by saying he would not be in favour of a special levy. “We do have reserves, a lot of them are earmarked for potential other things but I do also think that 10, 15 years is a long time. We don’t know who will be in government of the day…I don’t have a problem putting aside a little money, I don’t want it to be locked down though, in the eventuality that this may never come to pass… people may not realize the hospital that was built in the mid-70s is actually engineered already for a third floor. So there’s a lot we can do with what we have, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Withey.

Hernen said the recent deputation by MAHC and its board made it very clear that if a commitment for the local portion of the build was not made within the next 12 months, the project could not move forward. “If we don’t commit to our local share the planning stops. And if we can commit to our local share and the planning continues – and they’re talking construction in the next five to eight years, not 10 to 15 – so saving up money for 15 years to pay for something that’s coming in eight is not gonna work.”

Alcock said how long it will take to start building the hospitals is not entirely clear. “When I put out these potential ideas, we will have a report coming back from staff that will roll out all of the various options,” she said, referring to a request of Town of Huntsville staff at the last council meeting. “I simply put out that similar to some of the suggestions you [Hernen] raised about we have reserves – we have healthy reserves – but I think that we also need to save those reserves which Councillor Withey also said,” said Alcock as she was cut off by the moderator’s bell.

Other discussions included affordable housing and affordable living, short-term rental accommodations and how to regulate them, support for the arts and culture, Huntsville’s new streetscape, the inclusion of marginalized groups in decision-making, and if elected what the candidates’ first day in office would look like.

If you didn’t attend the forum, you can watch it in its entirety in the stream below courtesy of YourTV. You can also see related stories at the bottom of this post.

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