Yeah,
we're good.
Good evening, folks. I appreciate everybody's patience. We had a few technical difficulties, but it looks like they've been resolved. So I now call the special open committee of the whole meeting of Monday, June 7, 2021 to order and request that everyone turn their cell phones off for the duration of the meeting. As there are members of council attending remotely, I'll ask the acting clerk to do a roll call to begin the meeting.
members are to respond verbally to the roll call and when voting today. I will ask that when
members aren't speaking that they ensure their computer mics are turned off so we don't experience
any feedback. Alison?
Thank you. Councillor Bush.
I would like
to begin by acknowledging with respect that we are in Treaty III territory and that the land on which we are gathered
is the traditional territory of the Ashenabi and Mati people.
Madam Clerk would like to ask you
to for someone to move and second the motion to convene this special open meeting.
Yes, thank you.
That's what I left upstairs. So yes, I need somebody to motion and someone to second convening this
meeting please. Councillor Price and Councillor Martin McKinnon and
unfortunately in the adventure of
technology. I left the resolutions upstairs. Basically, it's just going to say the council
convene a special open committee of the home meeting for the purpose of discussing the
following under presentations. We have an analysis of policing services from MNPLLP as
well as the addendum, which is the statement from the working circle regarding the discovery
of 215 bodies that form a residential school in British Columbia presented by the working
circle council members and under public notice we have a public notice regarding the public
consultation meeting on June the 24th.
Great thank you. I'd like to call for declarations
of pecuniary interest and the general nature thereof under the municipal conflict of interest
with respect to the agenda for this meeting.
Seeing none, good evening, and I'd like to welcome the general public and
our presenter, MNP, to our special committee of the whole meeting tonight.
As everyone is aware, City Council, formally requested a second contract policing proposal from the Ontario Provincial Police on October 27th of 2020.
This followed a similar request made in 2017.
Three weeks ago, on May 17th, the OPP presented their contract policing proposal to the City of Dryden at a special open meeting of Council.
As part of doing its due diligence, Council hired MNP, one of Canada's largest chartered accountancy and business advisory firms, to provide an analysis of the policing services offered by the OPP and the Dryden Police Service.
This analysis focused on the areas of service delivery, costs, governance, and benchmarking
Dryden's policing activity and crime indicators in the context of other communities.
Having said that, our CAO Roger Nesbitt has been the single point of contact with the
MNP Dryden Police Services and the OPP through this process.
I just like to ask Roger in that role if he could talk a little bit more about for the
public's benefit as well as some of Council's, YMNP was selected, and perhaps for clarity
what was and was not included in the scope of work that Council through the Committee
asked MNP to perform for us.
Roger?
Thank you, Councillor Bush. Just before I get started, Ms. Seiler, I'm getting reports
that our live stream is not functioning. Maybe somebody could check into that. Make sure
that we're getting this meeting recorded. But thank you, Councillor Bush, and through
the chair. Over the past few years, I've had the distinct pleasure of working with Mr.
Lins and the team from M&P on several different engagements.
The M&P team not only brings a wealth and knowledge regarding financial and business
strategy development, but their team members have significant experience and knowledge in
municipal policing, policing leadership, as well as community safety and well-being strategies,
making them very well suited to complete this work for us.
For this engagement, the City requested that M&P update the Dryden Police Service and OPP
service comparison, the financial projections, and the call for service modeling that was
completed during the 2008 and 2019 study.
They were also requested to include benchmarking and municipal comparisons to provide context
to the community safety measurements that are included in the report.
M&P has provided this report to help council and the public better understand the complexities
of this review and to aid council in their ultimate decision to accept or reject the OPP policing proposal.
MMP was not requested to provide any recommendations on which police force would provide the best service for the city of driving.
So again, I welcome Mr. Lins to the meeting tonight and I thank him and the MMP team for their valuable work that they provided for us.
Thank
you, Roger.
In order, just again for the public's benefit as well, in order to ensure that the analysis
fully considered council's questions and concerns, the City's OPP Cost and Committee oversaw
the process to make sure MNPs, terms of reference were followed as described by Mr. Nesbid.
As a matter of procedure, Marin Council will be able to ask any questions they have for MNP
based on the items presented in their report tonight.
Questions I would ask be pertinent to the report only.
Also, although Councillors may have multiple questions,
I will ask that only one question be asked at a time
and I will rotate the questions
through the members of Council.
The public will not be able to answer,
ask questions tonight,
but there will be an open public meeting
for the public on June the 24th.
And next week on June the 14th, I believe we will have a presentation from the Dryden Police Service and the Dryden Police Services Board.
So I think we've covered off the procedural proceedings for the evening.
And so without further ado, I will invite Chad Lins of MNP to present the results of their analysis. Chad, the floor is yours.
Excellent. Thank you. That was flattered. I don't get Mr. Lynn's very often that kind of creep me out of that. But thank you Roger. That was very kind of me.
So thanks folks for having me this evening to present our report to you.
For those of you that I haven't met, I think most I probably have along the way, but for
those that I haven't, my name is Chad Lins, I'm a partner with M&P here in Winnipeg.
I lead the firm's community safety wellbeing consulting practice, so me and my team consult
with police services largely across Canada, as well as with justice departments in related
areas, we also work a little bit with other emergency response organizations like Fire
and Permix Services, but most of it is circled around policing in the justice environment.
So thanks again for having me to go through this. I've prepared a bit of a presentation
that gets the high notes from pieces of the report. Oh, I just lost that report. There it is.
So I'm just going to share that with you and go through it with you quickly.
There is it is it showing up now? Is it sharing? Yeah, looks good from here.
Excellent. So just a bit of an introduction.
You know, some of this was spoken to a little bit already.
But you know, in 2018, 19, we kind of crossed the calendar year.
We were engaged to do an analysis of police services.
we've been re-engaged as Councillor Bush said to update that. I think what we wanted
to do this time was not recreate the last report. We wanted to highlight changes. We wanted
to keep this one a bit more succinct than maybe the last one. I make it a bit more digestible
for folks. So we certainly spent more focus, I think, on areas where maybe there were some
changes from last time compared to areas that were the same. Those things are still in
the last report and would still hold true.
The areas we're going to go through are Councillor
Bush alluded to the benchmarking. One of the things the cost and committee had asked for was
some benchmarking to help provide some context to some of the things that we're talking about.
That was something that wasn't in the last report and I think there had maybe been feedback that
that some of that context would be helpful for people to understand, so we'll go through
the benchmarking. We will go through a service comparison. Again, we've updated the table
that we used last time, at least in a summary form, to walk through with you. We did do some
more stakeholder consultations as well this time in particular, this time we focused on
communities that either had recently switched to or switching to the OPP from a municipal service
and then in reverse, folks that were switching or had recently switched from the OPP to another
service. The only reason I say another service is some of them were not necessarily looking at
their own municipal service, but looking at maybe contracting that with another municipal service,
which is certainly an option to municipalities inside of the act. And then finally, we'll go through
the financial analysis against. We've updated that all with some new numbers. We've taken
a little bit of a different strategy on how to project that out, a spectrum of options
more so than one scenario to try and map out. So we'll go through that as kind of the last
piece of the puzzle. On to the benchmarking. As I mentioned, the Costing Committee had said
It would be nice to have some context where does Dryden sit in some of this to help people
kind of understand some of that context.
We've used primarily statistics Canada data that gets reported to stats can annually
by police services.
There are, I think, one or two small data points that we use from the OPP particularly related
to cost per property, but the vast majority of this comes from stats Canada from 2015
through 2019 inclusive. That's the most up-to-date data that stats can't have. So, we've used
the major indicators that they report on. The first being crime severity index, the second criminal
instance clearance rate. Police can cost sworn off sort of population ratio and then we do a bit
across indicator to look at. Are there trends in there that kind of hold up to what we would typically
expect them to hold up to.
So the first one of those is crime severity index. Crime severity index
is a measure of how much crime is coming to the attention of the police and the seriousness
of that crime. The volume of crimes are multiplied against a weight that are given to them,
the more serious the crime and the higher the weight. And then that math works out into an index
That is a measure of volume combined with seriousness to land on kind of one number.
So inside of the communities that we looked at for benchmarking, we worked with the
cost and committee on what the right communities would be.
Some of them are geographic, you know, canoral, fort, frances, sous-lookout, et cetera, readily.
Some of them are also, you know, similar in size to the best that we could.
You know, benchmarking never being a perfect size, but we tried to get comparator municipalities
that would have had kind of similar populations instant rates, those types of things.
So, inside of that, I didn't have the highest average CSI within that group over that 5-year
period.
That's an average.
Your current CSI is actually higher than 14 right now, but that's the average over those
years.
It also had the second-high growth over that period of time, so annually the average
growth rate was the second-highest at 17% growth over that period of time, which you
can see from the top graph.
And then both violent and non-violinants that are increasing, they split the non-violent
and violence CSI for interest purposes, obviously.
I didn't put that graph on there, but the nonviolence CSI is growing at a faster rate than the violence CSI. So that's in the report as well. So that's crime severity index. I think one of the important things to note here, too, is any one of these topics I don't think can be taken in isolation as well. I think you've got to look at them all together. I think dangerous to extract kind of one of them and take it out of context as well.
also I would encourage folks to kind of look at all of these in in in conglomerate. So so criminal incidents are the occurrence of one or more criminal offenses during a single distinct event regardless of the number of victims.
So it's not call for service. You could have calls for service that don't result in an incident that they're that we determined that there was no incident having occurred there.
So when we when we benchmark dry and against those communities against we had the second highest rate of criminal instance per 100,000 population, which is how that's most often measured to equal it out across communities with different populations.
And it was also tied for the highest average annual growth rate and criminal instances during that same period.
So again, that's been increasing the top graph there just shows a linear regression line which is the best fit line across that graph.
And the formula they're showing that along that line if you use that line as the as the growth over time.
That's an increase of 127 incidents annually over that period of time.
is criminal incidents. So clearance rate is the proportion of criminal incidents
solved by the police. It's a metric that stats Canada reports solved by the police. I've
put in quotations. It can mean a few things. It can mean that a charge was laid. It can mean that
there was enough evidence to lay a charge, but there was a different outcome. So solved, I've left
in quotations, to some degree. So, guys, planetary decreased over that period of time, and it had
the largest decline of the benchmark municipalities. All of them were very close to the same over that
period of time other than one of them. So, yeah, and clearance rate can be affected by
by several things, including the mix of the incidents that are in there.
So again, take that in context too.
So when we get into cost of policing, Jordan has the highest average policing cost per
capita of the benchmark communities at 5.11.
Oh, that's actually the, that is incorrect.
Second highest at 488, sorry about that.
Out of those communities, we've also included the Canadian average in there for interest
sake and then the Ontario average at $276 to give you some perspective. I think Winnipeg is
probably just over that $400 per capita for the Winnipeg fleet service, somewhere in that ballpark.
And then on the per property cost, this comes from the OPP reports these numbers and then this
drive number is based on the cost is reported inside the FIR or divided by the number properties
are in that report as well. So it's the highest of those communities where we were able to do that
comparison as well.
When we look at service strength, so Dryden has a relatively high number of
small officers for its population. So 242 per 100,000. Again, they use the 100,000 population to
provide that evening help for the benchmarking. Canada's average 188 in Ontario 185 over that period of
time. And then some others along the way. You'll see that those particular community are municipal
services. One of the challenges with the OPP can be, because of the regional model, they don't
necessarily allocate officers to a particular municipality, they allocate them to the region,
which makes it a little harder for us to do an apples to apples on some of the
per officer calculations. So you'll find that in ones where we weren't able to do
that fairly, we didn't use them, but use them in areas where we could.
So when
we talk about cross indicators, there are a few things that kind of hold true
and they make sense when you walk through them. For example, this first graph has
the cost per property again, you know, typically communities that have higher
crime severity indexes have more police officers, which equals more cost. That generally holds
true, and when we graph these things out, there are times when we find significant outliers
inside of those things, and there's times where we don't, if everybody in the benchmarking
fits pretty well. And certainly in this case, you know, Dryden has the high CSI of this particular
group, and it also has the highest cost per property. You know, on the graph on the right,
you know, Smith falls, you know, I would say to my, at least stands out in that graph as an example,
but you know, Dryden's high CSI and a number of incidents certainly do fit logically with the
fact that it's cost and it's officers' population are high compared to the comparator group as well.
So that's benchmarking in a nutshell. Again, you know, it was an exercise that we were asked to do
to provide some context and provide some information to folks who likely don't spend a lot of time
working in this type of data or seeing these types of things. So hopefully it provides folks
some context to be able to absorb all of that. So on to the service comparison. So we did this
exercise in the last analysis as well. There are a couple of minor things that have changed that we've
highlighted, but we've included the table from last time with pretty much the same components
to it. So, from a staffing level point of view, DPS has 20 sworn officers at last time,
and five civilians. The new OPP drawing detachment would have 57.89, including the 25.89 that
that were included in the costing proposal.
Of course, the other side of that being the folks
that are already there doing the region.
And then 9.6 civilians, including the six FTEs
that were added in the costing proposal.
Excuse me, Chad.
Yeah.
Would you like questions as you go in each section
or would you prefer to wait till the end?
Whatever works best for you, sir.
Okay, well, we've just finished the benchmarking.
Councillor Shane McKinnon had his hand up.
Councillor McKinnon, did you have a question on the benchmarking?
A number of them. Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Lins for your report.
As a few things have changed since 2019, and I'm sure we'll get to all of that.
Just to note about my questions, I don't believe we have met or discussed the report at all.
I'm not on the cost and committee.
I'm not on the police services board.
I've got 30 years of police service with 10 as a police executive.
So I'll be asking some questions based on my experience.
The first one is in regards to benchmarking.
I don't know how this particular crime severity index morphed
into the report.
It wasn't in the last report.
I thought we were going to base our decision.
And on this whole thing based based upon cost, but none the last I obviously have this issue with a crash severity index and in particular, I'd like to point to, I think appendix to we could go to appendix to which qualifies some of the things or
to qualify some of the things that you're talking about, and that'd be table eight and appendix
two,
and we're there.
What I have a concern about the indication of violent and property crimes, because if
look at Trident, for example, the violent crimes and the property crimes are almost 50-50
split. That indicates quite a few things. Then if you go to Canora, Canora is almost two times
violent crimes versus property crimes. Sulicout is almost three times violent crime versus property
crimes. Red Lake is twice as many violent crimes as property crimes. Fort Francis is one and a half
times, and these are all estimates, but why aren't we focusing on that?
Why are we not doing it a deeper dive?
And by the way, I think you touched on it, but you didn't clarify it.
It's much easier to solve a violent crime, in my opinion, because you have witnesses,
than a property called crime.
And that skews your clearance rates.
So, benchmarking really needs a deeper dive before it's held out as a tool to determine
such an important issue as this.
You know, Howard Crimes reported by individual police services or the OPP versus the Dryden
Police Service, our theft under $5,000 reported as Crimes, are they cleared in a different
manner?
under the crime severity.
And I know that they're weighted, but how are they weighted?
We don't know that.
So it's almost an indictment of the Dryden Police Service
based upon information that we haven't dug into.
And I appreciate you had, you were either asked
or you volunteered to put it in your report.
But I think it's a poor reflection or an attempt
to poorly reflect on our police service.
You know, our assaults reported after the fact that's the question on a lot of police
services now.
If you were reporting assault duties later, does it, in fact, get reported on the, as
a severe crime?
So, this whole new angle that didn't appear in the 2019 report, I guess it's designed
to show Dryden as a hotbed of crime, but what relevance would it have to this costing
request. You know, I guess that's my question. What relevance does the crime severity
index have to choosing a police service, unless you're insinuating that the OPP can do a much
better job at policing driving? So I don't know the relevance or why it would be in this report.
can you explain that?
Mr. Linz, before you do, I'm going to ask our CAO who's got his hand up to
for comment.
Thank you and through the chair. I'll let Mr. Linz comment, but I would like
to say that MMP was requested to provide this benchmarking data by the Costing Committee
and that's what they did. I think that our DPS leadership could probably shed more light on
on many of these benchmarks next week
when they present two counsel.
And I think some of these questions maybe should be asked
of DPS leadership.
But I think the benchmarking data
does spark many questions, counselor McKinnon,
many like your own.
And I have many myself.
I couldn't agree with you more, Mr. Neswood.
I think you're absolutely right
that we should be hearing from the DPS on this and the OPP.
before it goes out in a survey to the community,
which unfortunately I think happened today.
So I guess you get my point,
but Mr. Linz, thank you if you could respond.
No, thank you and you make some good points.
There's no question, as I said,
I think I caution folks to,
you've got to take this stuff kind of in a conglomerate
and as Roger alluded to,
it was something we were asked to do to provide
some context to it. So folks had some background information and had some understanding of maybe where is Dryden in all of that.
We left it at a fairly purely statistical level to kind of leave some of those elements out, but I agree with you.
There's some nuance to those pieces that you mentioned the clearance rate.
You're absolutely correct if you've got small numbers of relatively petty property crime, etc.
There are lots of those crimes are never solved.
For lots of reasons, often, as you alluded, no witnesses.
At times when folks are busy, they're not a priority as well.
There's lots of other things to be pending priority on to your point about, or serious crimes
typically get the resources and all those other things.
So you're absolutely correct about that.
And again, I caution folks to kind of take none of these stats independently to make any
decision with, but to use them together in context to kind of help help have a general
understanding of kind of what's going on.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you.
I'm sorry, Councillor McKinnon.
I have other questions from other Councillors.
Thank you.
Councillor McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My next question is in regards to cost for property.
And I know we've gone up and down this particular street.
Both in the last report, and this report, and there were some variants there that I think people should be aware of. And one of them is the disparity between using cost per property, using cost per capita, using information from stats Canada, using other Ontario stats on exactly coming up with a cost.
It used to be a per household now for property, for comparison.
Also the fact that we have, Kenore for example, has twice as many properties than we do because
of their amalgamation scheme back in the 80s and 90s.
As well, Silicon has a special deal with the problems on paying.
So, their cost per property are artificially low.
When, in fact, they pay, I would suggest they pay twice as much as you're indicating in your presentation.
But those are a couple of things that the public should be aware of.
I'm asking you to comment on those if that, in fact, was part of your research.
Yeah, so the data we've used, we wanted to keep it the publicly available data that we didn't
do any manipulating to. We wanted to report it as it was reported publicly, so that's why we
used the stats 10 numbers as they sit in the cost per property numbers as they'd want. We had to do
the math on, you know, and again, as I said, we took the cost from the FIR and the properties and
and kind of did that math in our home.
And that's a fully advertised cost as well in there,
the 10, 40 average over the five years.
So that's why we went that route.
So yeah, we didn't include any of those nuances
as we used alluded to though.
Mr. Nesbitt.
Thank you and through the chair,
just to add a further comment, I guess to Mr. Lins,
I think from a standpoint of staff reviewing
the cost per property. Both the treasure and I are very confident in those numbers that are
presented. Councillor Schaiman-Kennedy is correct. There are a handful of municipalities
that qualify for, I'll call it a rebate. I don't know that the province would call it a rebate,
but I'll call it a rebate. And I think silicoats is probably in the neighborhood of about 30 to 35%.
So, right now we know that Canora is the highest cost per property out of all of the
OPP police municipalities.
I think if Siouacou didn't have the rebate, then they may qualify as the highest, but
that does again provide some context to Dryden's costs.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Nesbitt.
Councillor Carlucci.
Thank you, Chair.
I've read your report.
I find it very thorough, very well done, very detailed.
And it's sort of on the same line as that Councillor Schaimie can have asked.
I think you clarified the fact that you did use the FIRs that are public information that anybody
has access to.
And based on that information, I mean, it does show you population, it does show you households,
it does show you a cost of policing fire and whatever else you need to know on those
FIRs.
So really I encourage the public if they need to look at that.
It's something that's to do, right?
So I just want to confirm that you did do that and you mentioned that.
So that was my question.
You answered it at the same time.
So thank you.
Councillor Shane McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm in the last question about this, Mr. Lynn, is regardless of the cost per household
sold for the Dryden Police Service at the present time, but that cost will, according to
your model, go up with the acceptance of an OPP contract, at least for the shorter.
In that three-year proposal, absolutely, yeah, it would go up, yeah.
Yeah,
and Mr. Lynn, if I could just clarify that that's the one time three-year transition
cost to the policing OPP costing model.
Yeah, the three-year model as it's provided is at a higher cost than your current DPS
cost.
So, logically, your numerators going up, the denominators staying the same, or at least
we've assumed it's staying the same.
So that cost for property is going to be higher for those three years, for sure.
And we will not, a community that transitions to the provincial police, those three year transition costs are always generally always higher but they're not those first three years or not on the provincial OPP costing model.
That's correct.
They're there, an agreed upon contract for that three year period after that three year period then the
Model transfers into the call for service cost model. It does use property number of properties for
So to to allocate several costs and will when we get into the cost model will go through those
But there is a transition after year three into that model from the three year contract period
Okay, thank you. I want to carry on with service delivery comparison
Sure. Thank you. Thank you for that. So we talked about the number of officers. So the 20
sworn and five civilian in DPS and the 57, again, including the 25.89 added to
inside of the costee model and the civilians as well. Baring in mind, you know, DPS is a local
policing model. Those officers are dedicated just to the municipality of Dryden and Dryden alone,
Whereas that bigger number of officers in the OPP model is allocated across the region,
which would include the surrounding settlements as well as the provincial region inside of that territory as well.
So more officers, but bigger, bigger space to cover.
So both have 24 seven policing.
We talked to both of both stated minimums.
You know, the DPS in their collective agreement has a two officer on patrol at all times.
Those are often in there for safety reasons.
You know, when we talked to DPS, they stated they believe they're surpassing that probably
three quarters of the time.
They didn't have any data on that that we could use to show any analysis or what that might
look like, how often by how much are they surpassing to off his own patrol at all times,
but certainly anecdotally, they provided that.
You know, from answering calls, and this is something we talked about last time,
you know, certainly the inspector is available to respond to calls while on duty,
even as is the community safety officer and court security officer.
In certain instances there, they're sworn officers.
They could respond to calls as well.
The chief police typically doesn't.
We had talked to him about that.
he typically wouldn't, obviously, if it was an absolute emergency, he could, but he stated he
typically would not. On the OPP side, you know, because it utilizes an integrated regional model,
they don't have a stated minimum built into that, so they won't guarantee an absolute minimum in
any zone at one time, but they did say you could reasonably expect to see three to four
or constables plus a supervisor within the city on a fairly consistent basis.
They do provide that in need times of need either outside of the city of
drive or inside that might shift, depending on where the need is in any
particular instance, but that you could reasonably expect three or four plus that
supervisor. They as well would be able to use their community street crime unit and
the court's security and community safety officers if they needed to in certain
instances, and there's a support and operational
sergeant that could be deployable in certain instances as well.
So the services offered, so the specialized services not offered by DPS are
currently provided by the OPP. The OPP have historically not charged for those
services. At the time that we did the last report, they were sending a letter that
outlined those services, but they weren't charging for them yet. I believe that's still the case.
And then on the OPP side, so they will provide the City of Drywall services that DPS currently
does, as well as their provincial responsibilities, with the exception being the school crossing guards.
And I think there's been some changes maybe in that recently. Change from last time was animal and
parking control was removed from DPS responsibility. That was an exception last time that the OPP
you wouldn't have done, and now that's changed, so it has become moot to some degrees, so.
And in the city of Dryden, we'll continue, regardless of the model that we're responsible for
by-law enforcement and the crossing guards as well, regardless of the model. So, community safety
officer side, Dryden has a dedicated community safety officer. It's dedicated to Dryden and Dryden
alone, the OPP proposal has one CSO in it as well. It would be shared between the municipalities
in the region.
On the community policing side, certainly, you know, when we talk to folks,
you know, DPS is certainly actively involved in the community. When we talk to communities
that have the OPP's police, they echoed the same. They participate actively in involved
involved in community events and parades and all those kind of community elements.
And both, again, feedback from the DPS received me very open and responsive to work with
the city on trying to solve problems in the city.
Feedback we had from folks that have the OPP as their police service was the same that
they are typically quite open to working with the municipality and trying to solve local
problems related to police.
So,
on the additional and extra elements, ambulance calls, so the DPS is currently responding
to and attending all ambulance calls.
The OPP, and this is similar to the last report, what it's, and ambulance calls as they
were dispatched to, if they were dispatched, they would attend, if they weren't dispatched,
they wouldn't attend.
DPS is attending them all at the current moment.
Mental health transport, so in the last report, DPS was still in certain circumstances.
doing some mental health transports, they no longer are, they're providing a security
escort to health service providers to the ambulance. OPP will do the same, both charge
back accordingly for that service. Hospital security, DPS will remain at the hospital
with a patient when requested, subject to availability, and the OPP will remain at the hospital with
the patient for an agreed upon period. Officers typically leave once a form one is signed, so
it's still a little more finite on the OPP side. So, prisoner transport DPS currently
provides the city prisoner transport services. The OPP would do the same and build back on a cost
recovery basis. And court security DPS is currently responsible for court security. On the OPP's
model they would be responsible for, of course, security as well, and they have a mechanism to build
back for that too. And then just from a special team's point of view, the OPP of course has
access to the special teams that drive and currently has access to through the OPP. Again,
the OPP hasn't traditionally charged for those things.
But now it would be a part of the overall
detachment. So
that's a summary on the service side. Sorry, before you let Chad
any questions, Councillors on the service side.
Councillor Shane McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just one question, Mr. Lins. The indication is that the OPP will be
here and ready to go when they're needed and things. If they have an occurrence, let's say,
of the time, 40 minutes away.
And if it's an on-hand, all hands on deck type of occurrence,
they could, in fact, leave the city
unprotected, is that true?
So it's probably a better question for them.
Frankly, that is for me.
They're gonna answer it probably a lot more accurately.
You know, when we've talked to them about those instances,
they have certainly said they have the ability
to shift resources.
I don't think they would use the word unprotected, I think they would say, though, that at times they may have to shift, and I think they would counter by saying at times they could also shift resources in to driving in an all-hands on deck.
But again, it's probably a question that they can answer more accurately than I can.
Thank you. And if I may, Mr. Chair, one more, unless someone else has a question.
Yeah, go ahead, Councilor McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And we heard from the staff sergeant at the proposal, when they put the proposal forward.
And I wonder if you have a comment on this that the OPP in general are experiencing recruitment
issues way across the province, and I think for a number of reasons, not the least of
which is releasing is not become a...
We'll popular location in the last several years. Is that something that you've gleaned from the folks that you've talked to. So it didn't come up in our interviews. It's a really good question. It didn't come up in our interviews. I would concur with you, though, that we've kind of heard that across the country to some degree that it can be challenging. You know, when we've worked with the RCMP, we've certainly heard that.
some of the bigger municipal services, we've heard that as well. I think for some of the reasons you've alluded to that
It's a very challenging location and that folks are kind of given maybe more scrutiny now than they did 10 or 15 or 20 years ago
so
Pardon me or 30 years ago
I I started going this veered when I was at the farm last month and I realized it wasn't as white as I then you went to white or my thoughts
So it didn't so ask your question. It didn't come up in the interviews. Again, I think it's a good question for them to ask them directly, but I would concur we've heard that generally about policing in general.
Thank you.
Thank
you, and if I may, I think this whole question of turnover within with respect
to OPP or DPS is a good question, and I think we'll have an opportunity next week as
well to hear from the Dryden Police Services in terms of their recruitment issues and what
their turnover rate has been like in the last several years and what challenges they face.
So it might be a good discussion for comparison purposes as well,
Mr. Lind, you want to carry
on with stakeholder consultations?
Sure.
So as I mentioned in the entry, we focused on talking to communities that we're in some
state of flux or had recently been in some state of flux.
That is, they've transitioned from a municipal service to the OPP or counter to that, either
recently are in the process of going the other way from the OPP to another service provider.
So we started with, you know, transition from municipal to OPP. You know, we've labeled
the tables as perceived strengths and weaknesses. Certainly that's the perception of those folks
they have, you know, certain thoughts on it. Whether these, you know, hold true, there's certainly
it's certainly anecdotal evidence, but we've labeled it as perceived just just
to reiterate that. So certainly from the strengths of the transition from municipal
to PPP, you know, I think generally folks said the cost savings offered by the OPP, you were
you know, fairly significant as a contributing factor as to why, you know, there was some desire
to move into that contract paradigm versus the other municipal service. Certainly reduced liability
ability was mentioned and administrative burden I can kind of contract this off and
someone else can handle this now instead of us handling it as a municipality.
Certainly the OPP as related to that are we're perceived to very comprehensive policies
and procedures that we're not having to update and we're not having to review and redo and
they've kind of got that all taken care of in a package for us and that relieves us a lot
of stress and burden.
And certainly folks alluded to the fact that there was concerns about response times
and decreased levels of service.
In general, though, the jurisdictions we spoke to said they were quite satisfied with response
times and level of service to date.
So we just wanted to throw that in there.
It certainly was a concern of theirs, but to date, they've been quite pleased.
So, on the weakness side of moving from municipal OPP in general, folks were mindful to let us know that moving from municipal service to the OPP is quite a time and resource-consuming process.
There's a lot of effort that goes into that and don't underestimate it.
There was also a little bit of discussion around, you know, PPM members, maybe not being
dispatched to some very minor crimes, that maybe their local municipal service was attending
to.
And that they were allocating calls for service on a priority basis and some of those smaller
things, maybe that folks were used to having the police show up to, that maybe they weren't.
And again, that's perception, you know, just to make that point.
And a bit of a discussion around loss of familiarity with officers because of the regional nature
of the OPP, and the fact that as a big organization, folks certainly have lots of opportunity
to move around and take on new things, and that certainly that there can be a bit of that
as well.
So,
on the OPP to another provider, so again, we used the term another provider only because
because there was, it wasn't necessarily that they were going to have their own municipal
service.
There was some looking at contracting to another municipal service.
So perceived strengths, you know, because they had the OPP, you know, generally perceived
to be quite effective at what they do, the good police service, and at the cost again,
you know, were typically lower in comparison to the municipal service that had kind of
receded the OPP and when they had the OPP contract. But on the weakness side, you know, municipalities
really struggled with the call for service model a little bit. You know, I alluded to on the
benchmarking where it's a bit challenging in that because of the regional model, there's not
small officers kind of attached to areas or municipalities or contracts for that matter.
And they don't pay a lot of attention, then, you know, how many officers are here, how many are there, and there were some municipalities that struggled with that, not being able to say, you know, 28% or 28 of these officers are mine because they're used regionally.
Interestingly, the arcing fee does the other way they assign officers to a contract and then I think a time struggle a little bit more to track the calls for service that they go on.
So some jurisdictions also perceive that they're going to put regarding policing priorities were not necessarily acted on if they weren't in alignment with the broader OPP strategy that there was there was other other masters that had to be answered to inside the system.
And then one of the other points is again, these points that we've highlighted here, these are things we had heard a couple of times we didn't put down kind of every little nuanced point, just some things that kind of seem to come up a few times.
The last one being the ability for me is to ask your request additional officers was was often sometimes perceived to be limited in some cases depending on the request so seasonal influx, etc.
again, those are the perceptions of those communities, you know, the OPP or their municipal
services could probably either, you know, refute or confirm any of those things, but certainly
that was the perception of folks from both sides, both from the strengths of weakness
as point of view when we talk to them. So,
any questions on that one before we move on?
Chad, I don't see any hands. I have one question. With respect to
So people transitioning from OPP to another service provider, you noted in the strengths
that the OPP's costs were lower than who they transitioned from in the first place.
And so the driving factor in who did they transition back to or who did they transition,
were in the process of transitioning to given the fact that their costs went down.
What was the prime motivators there and who did they transition to?
So the motivators were, you know, I think a combination of probably these three things on this
slide, you know, some frustration around not feeling they were able to influence some of the
services, I think, in the way that they wanted to was the primary motivator. And I have to apologize,
councilor Bush I don't remember I think one of them might have still been
in transition and I don't mirrored you might be able to help me out I can't
remember and we didn't put it in the report because I think we wanted to give
these folks a little bit of anonymity as well so maybe it's best that I don't
remember.
Okay thank you all go to councillor Shane McKinnon and then councillor
or John Cardo-G.
Mr. Chair, just in regards to this area, Mr. Lynn's,
obviously moving away from our own municipal service
to a OPP service is a win-way street here.
I mean, we're, if we make that decision,
we're not coming back.
We're not looking at other services as an option.
Did you pose the question to any of these municipal
leaders. I assume it wasn't elected officials that was just CAO's as indicated in your report.
That's correct. You were correct. Yep.
Did you pose a question to them? If you could go back in time knowing what you know now,
would you have given up your own police service?
So I would say the ones that are transitioning back. I mean, I don't want to speak for them,
but there are ones that are transitioning away from the OPP.
So again, you know, I think I need to be careful and not speak for them, but they're moving away from me.
For those reasons.
I have other questions, but I see Mr.
Councillor Karloucci.
Through the chair, thanks again for your information.
Just a question, I guess.
Did you have a number of who came, how many went from OPP to another service and then vice versa?
Turn your study to do ask that question.
So we did, but we knew that too when we went into our interviews, we had picked them
for particular reason, i.e. they'd either move to the OPP or moving away.
So I don't think that percentage would be an indicator of some trend.
It was just kind of the communities we had on the list that we knew that had been in some
recent.
Again, flux.
They were making some transition.
So I don't think the percentage of those would be an indicator of any statistically significant
draft.
That's fair.
Thanks.
Thank you, Roger.
Thank you.
Just to add a couple of comments, I guess, to your question, Councillor Bush.
I think overall the communities that we did speak to that were either, you know, I'd signal
that they were looking to move away from the OPP or had already moved away, but we did ask the
question in regards to consideration of moving to their own municipal force and I think in all
cases it was cost prohibitive to do that. So in all cases they were looking at or had contracted
with another municipal, neighboring municipal, larger municipal service to provide policing services.
if that helps to answer your question.
Yeah, Rodgeron is a great point.
I think one of the things to note there as well is they had,
that was an option for them.
They were located in a geography where that was an option for them.
Going back to municipal service, they found cost prohibitive
but they're in a geography where they have some options.
And just further comment in regards to Councillor Shane McKinnon's
question about whether or not elected officials were spoken to. So, this particular study
counselor McKinnon, we talked to city managers, CAOs, at various municipalities. During
the last study though, we did talk with various municipalities. We talked to elected officials
in some of those municipalities and even elected officials that were part of the police services board and such when decision when their decisions were made to transition to the OPP away from a municipal force and and in all of those cases,
you know, those individuals were, they felt that it was the right decision at the time and they felt, you know, really years later that it was still the right decision and they were and very happy with the OPP service.
So we have we have spoken with elected officials police services board members prior board members both current and prior board members in various municipalities thank you
Councillor McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you, Mr. Linz and Mr. Nesby for your comments.
I've always felt that there's a certain trepidation by anyone speaking about their police service in a negative fashion.
So I always take that in with a grain of salt, but the media focuses on the negative things rather than positive things most of the times.
and in from minute elected officials, and I don't know Mr. Lindsey whether you heard this or Mr.
Nezboot, whether it was I'm sure there's some anonymity to some of the folks who have been speaking out,
but that they were upset with introductory offers that went sideways. There was a charge. There was
too much after three years. There was no explanation about a call for service rationale that was different from
what was proposed. My specific question is whether or not, because I heard this from an
elected official, that they're in-person policing. So a police officer, he or she, attending
a call, a theft under it. So, you know, my lawnmower is missing. It's the first time I've
called the police in 20 years. I paid taxes in his town. And they've been put to or directed
it to
So, a telephone response unit, taking that personal service away, and I believe that's becoming
certainly in the because of COVID, more rampant, I guess, in southern Ontario than it has
been ever, but do you see that kind of transition, or was that ever discussed with any of these folks?
I can't recall any anecdotes that were similar to that in our discussions with those municipalities.
Certainly we're aware of several of those initiatives that have online reporting,
or some version thereof, for those crimes that you've kind of suggested there,
Councillor McKinnon, the theft under the property, et cetera.
Certainly in Winnipeg as well, we have that.
Now you can take a video of it and send it in and you get your police report number
for insurance and kind of, you know, bobs your uncle to some degree.
I mean, some of that's the deal with the volume of those things.
Some people like that better, but certainly we're certainly aware of those tools that are
out there to some degree, but none of them specifically came up in our interviews.
So yeah, it didn't come off, I guess it's my answer, but we're certainly aware that
those are out there and exist for sure.
Thank you.
You'd like to carry on Mr. Lins?
Sure.
Uh, so the last section is the financial key.
So, you know, we used the similar model to last time.
We had lots of assumptions and pieces in there
that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel on.
But, you know, at the end of the day, we, again,
created the model to try and compare the two models
to the best of our abilities.
You know, on the DPS side, we rely on historical cost trends
to a greater degree in those cost drivers, you know,
with the assumption that the best indicator
of the near futures likely are near pass
and what the trend line looks like.
The OPP model inputs rely on, I guess, really OPP.
So I didn't allude to the contract period,
which is the OPP's cost proposal.
And then when it moves into the costing model,
it relies on the number of properties times some rates
and we'll go through those.
and then it relies on cost for service and using those cost for service to allocate the OPP's
total cost for the municipalities. It's police across those municipalities. It uses a tool
to to cost allocate those so we'll go through that too. This time around we took a bit of a different
strategy instead of coming up with a scenario to model because I think you know we were we didn't
want it to say, hey, we're saying this is what the future looks like. We said, let's have the model
be able to kind of do a bunch of scenarios and see if it reacts in different ways. So we were
able to look at what if calls for service increased by a percent, two percent, three percent. We can plug
any number we really want in there and see what it does. So that's a little bit different than the
last time around where we had picked a scenario. Again, based on the history and the trend that
driving was experiencing but we kind of modeled one of those and here we modeled a bit of a spectrum.
So on the assumption side, I'll really highlight the assumptions that the model uses
and then and then show you some of the results. We can talk about that. So DPS costs have been
increasing at an average of about 3.1 percent annually. If you do that same linear regression slope,
it's both 92 and a half thousand dollars a year out of that five year period.
Historically, some more officer rates were increasing at 2.77% annually on an average.
There wasn't adjustment made at the beginning of the model to reflect
recent collective agreement settlement that wasn't in the 2019 financial statements
and benefits have been recalculated as a result of that settlement to be 25% of salary. So that's
the assumptions we use there.
Night guard cross, we've been increasing costs,
sorry, I've been increasing at 5.14%,
office at 5.53 and benefits on the office side
have been 19% historically of salary costs.
We've used 2% as general inflation for those other elements.
In a police service, most of those costs are covered
by the people as a service organization, you know.
So, you've got a minority of the cost then subjected to general inflation of 2%.
On the capital cost side, we took the capital cost that we used last time.
We had created a capital cost schedule based upon historical capital replacement spending
from DPS, includes, of course, things like cruiser cars and pieces of equipment, et cetera.
We took the time frame that those were typically being replaced and created a schedule for that.
We updated that schedule by adding, we'd add a couple of years to it, and we also added
some inflation to it as well to push that out for the extra couple of years, the model
I added.
So, again, on the cost assumption side, like the last study, we used call for service
volume to determine featured demand, and although not a perfect proxy for officer need, it's
certainly the one that we have, that's most available
and correlated to us.
Call service is also one of the main drivers
of the OPP costing model.
So we felt that that seemed appropriate.
So when we did the first study,
Calls for Service Processor were about 400 at the time.
They're now about 460.
We used 550 as a water line to save.
If we're averaging that,
we're going to have an officer to bring that average down. There was some discussion about
what is that number. You know, 550 is the number we landed on last time when the DPS was involved
in that discussion. So again, you know, certainly I had discussion with the cost and community on what
to do with that. I decided to leave it at the 550 because we had made that decision last time
with DPS's involvement, so that's what we used in this model as well.
That gives, that's quite a bit of stretch,
I mean from 4 or 60 to 550 each officer would be taking on another 90 calls per year
before there would be any increase in officers that are so.
So that's how we built that model.
We had to make some call for service adjustments as we did last time.
We have to remove calls for service when we insert them into the OPP model.
We have to remove calls from service.
That would be considered the OPP's jurisdiction anyway, they would be doing that anyway.
And then we removed calls for service that the DPS currently responds to that the OPP would
not.
So DPS did that for us, helped us out quite a bit to do that.
The larger is one of the DPS where they would attend the OPP
or not are under assistance, the labeled assistance,
and most of those are medical assistance.
Of note, the occurrence data this time around
is different than last time.
So when DPS went to an object, their software provider,
they had directed them to use a different data set
than we used last time.
We spent a lot of time trying to figure that out
and how to reconcile the two.
We worked quite extensively with DPS to try and get that figured out and reconciled to the best of our abilities.
At the end of the day, we came very close, but we're not able to kind of get those two to match.
So if you were to look back at the last study and compare it to this study, some of those numbers are different,
only just because the data set that we were given to use is different.
As I said, we worked quite closely with DPS to try and reconcile those and just weren't quite able to get there.
So we dust them up the best we could and then use the data set that DPS gave us as a result
of that data pull from the record management system to use inside of both models.
So this is a sample. Sorry, I'm just going to cheat here and look at what the next line is.
Okay.
So this is a sample of the OPP cost model just to give you a sense of how it works.
It takes the last three years of calls for service.
It puts them into categories.
It takes a three-year average.
And then it has an average time standard for that kind of call for service.
It multiplies those together and then says as a proportion of the provincial total,
you end up being this much percent of the total.
It adds that all up at the end of the day and says,
because here's your total from the total of all of our costs to police municipalities across the province.
So it's really just a way of saying we police all these municipalities.
We need a way to split it up. Here's the way we split it up.
We, we, a bit of a kid into crime surveillance. We give a waiting of time to certain types of calls.
We, that creates an hours demand for us.
The percent of your hours demand of the total hours demand is going to be your percent of the cost at the end of the day.
So, to be able to then use that in a scenario where we're saying what if
calls for service go up or what if calls for service go down. We took a look at
all of the OPP cost models that they've had since the methodology started and
we looked at total demand, total demand has been increasing at approximately
0.9 percent every year, so that's the hours demand that the OPP is seen. So because
Because it's a cost allocation methodology, if your demand goes up at 0.9%, you will remain
the same proportion of that group going forward.
If, in that case, your cost would go up by the 3.45%.
So I think we talk about the 3.45 here in a bit, but what we did with all the cost models
that exist is we said, okay, here they are, and just five of them now.
and we put the same number of calls for service,
which was Dryden's calls for service last year,
we put them in all the models.
And when we looked at what the cost would spit out,
that was an increase of 3.45% a year.
And then our assumption, of course,
is that the calls for service are the same,
that 3.45% then we are assuming is attributed
to the fact that the OPP's costs just go up over time,
because of salaries and operating costs
and all the other things.
So, so in this particular case,
because the demand for hours is going up 0.9%, if your demand for hours goes up 0.9%,
you are keeping pace with the Joneses as it were, so you would expect then that you would maintain
the exact same proportion of the cost inside the model. However, we would expect that you would
still see that 3.45% increase because that's an operating cost issue. Not a, I make up more of the
calls for service proportionately now issue. So what we did then is we said, okay, if my calls
for service, my demand goes up by more than 0.9%. Now I'm starting to proportionately eat up
a big chunk of the cost. So we looked at doing that a couple of different ways. The way we ultimately
did is we said, for example, if calls for service are going up 3.9% for easy math, then my cost would
then proportionately take on 3 percent more as well or at my cost would go up 3 percent.
The math doesn't quite work out that well. There's a little nuance around it. It's not quite
3 percent, it's actually less than 3 percent. Your cost would actually go up. As the denominator gets
bigger, that becomes less important as well, the gap between you and the rest of the group becomes
less important. But what we did to simplify it is said, let's assume that's the case. It's a
conservative assumption we're overestimating the cost because of that math and that's kind
of the math that we use to determine if your costs for service are going up higher than
the .9, we take the difference and we apply that to your cost.
So
in addition to the per call for service costs, there are some other costs inside of the
model that are based on property numbers.
So the base service cost is the first one.
The average per property cost for the last three years was 183.42.
That rates actually decreased over time.
But again, to be a bit conservative, we left it at 183.42.
We didn't decrease it over time.
We left it where it was and then we left the properties at 3856 as well.
Since the last study, the number of properties has went down as well.
But we didn't forecast any further decreases.
We just left it at the 3856.
So you'll see there's a $707,000 base service charge
across all the years because we didn't want
to forecast a decrease.
Oh, should've clicked.
Prisoner transport is also a per property cost.
It has been increasing by 0.93% average on an annual basis.
So we've used that increase over time.
The accommodations of cleaning, again, as decreased over time, but we held it constant
again just to be a bit conservative.
And then over time, we used, as we did in the last model, we used the OPP's cost and
the proposal on increased it by that annual operating cost estimate that we kind of did
our own math on when we put all the same calls and the different models to find this 3.45
percent increase.
So you'll find that the over time is increasing at that same rate, which is what we did last
time as well.
So, for severance costs, there's really three components, and again, we used the same ones
that are the same.
Three components, one officer, element to it.
there's a little...
So, we've estimated a severance cost of approximately $2 million. So, that assumption, although we don't know what the answer will be, I think, you know, last time we gave kind of a spectrum all the way from zero to 100% of no one being accepted. You know, this time we kind of landed on an assumption here to simplify it a little bit. And we did ultimately last time, too. But I think in the report.
or we provided the spectrum.
So that number assumes the chief police inspector
and the civilians won't transfer.
We have no, you know, that may not be the case,
but that's what this is predicated on.
It also assumes 75% of the remains
will often would transition to the OPP.
And the dispatch contract termination fee,
which I think is $110,000, $10,000,
that exists in all the scenarios.
You'd be going to a different paradigm
and you'd have to pay that fee.
It's part of the of your contract.
So that's Severance Cost.
So just provided some of the visuals that go with that.
You know, again, we provided more of a spectrum this time.
Then we did kind of one scenario.
And here's what the scenario looks like.
The slot on the left is the OPP under the six different.
You know, scenarios that we chose.
One being calls for sure.
There's a flat one that they actually go down 1% every year.
And then increasing 1 through 4% annually.
So that contract periods the same, the other thing is there's a year zero on the OPP one.
There should be a year zero.
It goes from one to 16 on the right. It should go from zero to 15.
My apologies. I can fix that.
The year zero is to include the startup costs in the OPP transition.
So severance is in there.
The startup costs are on equipment, etc.
It's both $3 million, so there's a startup cost at time zero that of course doesn't exist in the DPS version of the model.
So it starts at zero, the OPP starts at three and then that contract period for the OPP would be the same in all the scenarios because it's locked into the greater degree.
And then of course that model changes in the different call for service scenarios.
On the DPS side, there's only four lines there, and it's only because the decline of one percent, the flat and the decrease of one percent, have been cost to them.
It's not enough change in the cost to have added any officers or do anything differently, so they're actually there, but they're kind of layered on top of each other.
Those are annual costs.
So we've also, instead of wrapping them separately, we've graphed them together just a couple of the scenarios to keep it a little simpler but so on the on the left we've got the flat call for service scenario again with DPS starting at zero dollars and the OPP one starting at about 3 million.
And then over time, it shows that OPP contract and then a drop when we start to use the call for service model based upon the assumptions that we've just talked about.
And then kind of go ahead off into time. Those are the annual costs inside that model. We didn't put actual calendar years on here.
We used kind of year zero year one just because we weren't 100% certain where we would end up in the timing of this.
So. And then we also did a cumulative version of the same. So again, kind of same thing.
You know, you find OPP starts at a cumulatively higher cost. And you know, in that year,
eight ish, in the flat calls for service and in your nine ish, the OPP's lower annual cost catch up
and then the two kind of cross. The flat call for service, you know, at the end of the 15 years,
years year, the OPP's cost of approximately 72 million in the DPS 83 and the 4% annual
growth and cost for service were 90 and 99 respectively.
So there was in our final or my final meeting with the costing community, there was a question
to say, could you create a bit of a comparison?
The OPP proposal has more sworn officers in it, so those graphs are comparing the models
as they look today. It was requested, could you show visually what that would look like if we added
officers to DPS to match the number in the OPP proposal? So we added 7, 2.
Again,
use the inflation rate of 2.77% on the salaries and then graph.O. What it really does is create a
bit of a hypothetical about starting with that many officers.
What we did though is we didn't change the parameters around when you would add an officer.
So when DPS starts with that many officers, most of the scenarios, it doesn't actually
change officers.
It never gets to that level where it needs to change them.
So, visually, it looks like it's on an annual basis.
You've got a bigger gap between the OPP and DPS models in both scenarios.
and then cumulatively, again, same thing.
You just find the transition happening a bit earlier
because, of course, DPS now is much higher cost
in this hypothetical scenario.
Again, as I mentioned, DPS doesn't end up
at that much different spot
because we really don't have any officers.
It starts with quite a few officers
and then is able to maintain them
throughout the period of the model.
With in the flat scenario, DPS being about 103 million
versus the OPP 73.
and then DPS really not changing a lot in the 4% hypothetical scenario to 109 versus the
OPP's 90. So,
that is the financial piece. I believe that's the last one. Yeah.
Councilor, that's a lock. So, any questions on that stuff?
Councilor Shane McKinnon.
Talk to you Mr. Chair.
Talk to you so much.
I said I must have learned that we're almost in the encoded bubble.
So I'll just I'll just carry on here.
So the bottom line from your your graphics there is sometime in 2030 or 2031.
If everything that you've indicated comes to fruition.
We may start to see some savings with the OPP.
Yeah, it depends who we, we didn't, again, we didn't put years on the graphs only because we weren't quite sure.
You know when the start would be this took a little longer than we expected to.
So we had visions of kind of trying to map it out month by month or or at least year by year.
And then ultimately decided on using kind of year zero and year one through what not.
Yeah, where those lines cross, that's where you see, that's where you see the cumulative
cost start to flip depending on the scenario that will be in different years.
Thank you, Mr. Lynn. I have more questions.
Yes, Roger first.
Thank you, and through the chair.
Councillor McKinnon's question is, you know, is a good question. I think for many of us that
be looking at this data now for a while. With the OPP suggesting that maybe there should
be a consideration for an increase in sworn officers, I think the question in many people's
minds at this point is the current DPS staffing model adequate from a standpoint of number
of sworn officers. That was the basis for us asking for the hypothetical analysis,
analysis, costing analysis, what if the number of officers were matched in both models?
I think I hope that next week when Chief Paulson and police services board chair bates present
the council, that question can be explored a little further.
Because it would then play into a lot of these assumptions on when calls for services
for DPS would drive the addition of more sworn officers to address that that volume of calls.
So that's a significant question I think that the council should be seeking answers on.
Thank you.
Thank you, Roger. Councillor Shane McKinnon.
Thank you again, Mr. Chair. I'd like to start Mr. Lin's my first area that jumps out at me
is the disparity between your report in 2019 and that released on Friday and granted.
These are all estimates but there's a huge gap in numbers illustrated and I think it's
becomes part of this convoluted calls for service area which I'm going to ask you some questions
about later. But in 2019, you reported the drive police service numbers as being in year
three, according to your information on financial summary 3.3.10. And you reported the numbers
is $4.5 million. In fact, and I realize what it contains, what it has. And most of those
things are a wash because it's a court cost or sometimes a wash and court transportation
and it's grants forward and things like that. But there was, it was in fact, $3.9 million,
which is a difference of like a half million dollars. And you're, and you also reported
in year three, the OPP, so this would be year three, 2021, would be $4.8 million when, in fact,
we just got an estimate from them last week, at $5.2 million, or $365,000 difference. So that's
in the one report, that's the difference of $951,000.
is that, am I reading that properly? Is that the difference between those two reports?
And again, I realized that these are just estimates. But you can anticipate, or didn't,
I am sure, just didn't anticipate three years of 2% increase by the OPP. There's been
one arbitration award for the DPS. I think that's probably why we're all gathered here today.
But can you speak to that?
Yeah, I'm going to try and you're correct in your assumption.
We talked to DPS a little bit about that.
Their costs have been fairly flat over that period.
They did talk about some of their cost containment strategies
that they've employed over that period of time.
They had also, and I don't have my notes in front of me from our discussions with DPS,
but I think they had had some folks, some turnover of people a little bit that had mitigated some
of their costs as well.
So there are some differences there, for sure, that we, you know, as you said,
we certainly wouldn't have anticipated. On the OPP side, you know, on their new cost,
If there are new cost proposals a little bit different, if I recall, I think there's a
few, there's a little extra horsepower in their newest proposal and there was last time
which would have changed, yeah, I think you're right.
So to your point, yes, you're correct, again, I think DPS has done some things to mitigate
some costs.
I think they've had some things happen, that their costs were mitigated, maybe out of their
controlled some degree. Again, on the OPP side, you know, we've got a little bit more
horsepower on the proposal, but you're correct. What we've been asked to do and what we've done is
put together a list of assumptions and say, based on what we know, you know, do these seem like
reasonable assumptions and if we agree they do, what are the financial results of those assumptions?
They're not meant to be predictive. Certainly in any way, shapeable from that anyone would want
to hold anybody to you, but they're certainly meant to try and show the result of those assumptions
and if we believe those assumptions to be true, that's as good as we're going to get.
I'm kind of thinking so.
Just to follow up, Mr. Chair.
Yes, when to follow up and then I'm going over to Stephen Langstell role. So go ahead.
You said this is not to be presumptive.
That's why you were here. I mean, that's why we asked you to do this report.
So we can get the best advice we can. So I mean, if you're putting out these numbers,
We assume that there's some credence to it.
The best you can, and I understand that, but I think you're the show.
I mean, you're going to make up some minds here, I'm sure.
Obviously the public consultation is down the road and we haven't heard from the DPS yet,
but there's a lot of people going to hang her hat on what you're saying.
And I just want to point that out because I think it's very important to us.
Yeah, and I guess just to clarify, not presumptive, but predictive in that, we've not been asked to say,
predict the future and tell us what it's going to be. What we've been asked to do is do a
comparison to the best of our abilities based upon the assumptions we have today. I think everyone
to the greater degree needs to take all of that, as you said, with some grain of salt. We know
we're not going to nail that to the dollar. What we want to do is get order a magnitude, which is
really all you can do I think in these scenarios is get kind of order a magnitude track.
Thank
you, Mr. Van Stiller. Yeah, good evening, through the chair. A few points, and Chad makes probably the greatest one is that I don't think that MNP was tasked with providing a recommendation or any cost certainty. This is some information for council to consider. And from an order of magnitude, it provides a very solid and
sound analysis. For somebody who's in a position who provides forecast data, I would not want
to be held to any of those numbers because when we make an assumption through time, sometimes
those assumptions don't come to fruition. A good example is with regards to DPS and in 2020 we
We have five uniform officers leave and they were recruited and replaced, but I think at
least two were at very the lower levels of those collective agreements.
So that's going to impact the 2020 costs as well as we have an outstanding collective
agreement for 2020.
So the actual 2020 costs are still to be determined with regards to DPS.
So I just want to provide a little bit of background with regards to the DPS estimate that MNP had done the last time, but also some context around this report that again it's supposed to provide council with an order of magnitude and I think it does a very good job of that.
Thank you. Just a comment before I go back to Mr McKinnon.
I think one of the challenges that the Costing Committee had, and I believe that Council will have going forward, and I think the discussion next week with the Dryden Police Service and the Police Services Board might help shed some light on that is the very large difference, the gap in what the Ontario provincial police and our local police force are saying is required in terms of numbers of officers to adequately police and protect our community.
based on the first police costing committee process, the main driver for local police services
manning, I believe was primarily population. And the OPP's driver is calls for service
and criminal activity. So when we looked as a police costing committee at what level of
calls of service and calls per officer would drive more officers required in the Dryden Police
Service. Initially, it went from 400 calls per officer to 550 calls per officer.
And when you look at that, that's a 38% increase in calls per officer before you add any officers.
So in my mind and in the minds of others, that's an outstanding question about how many officers
does it actually take to protect our police force?
We've heard from the OPP what their answer is,
and I believe next week we'll hear
from the Dryden Police Service in terms of what their answer is,
but a number of us struggled with that 38% increase
in calls, driving an increase in manning,
because is it a population that drives the increase
in requirements or is it the actual calls
for service and criminal activity?
So in my mind, that's an outstanding item man
an issue that we still need to get some clarification on it as a council.
Councillor McKinnon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think that task is not up to the DPS or the OPP.
It's up to the advisors from the solicitor general's office and maybe our council members
who are on the police services board can speak to that. But just if I could carry on.
So, and the bottom line, I think I'm reading this correctly, is that in 2021, in this year,
the OPP would cost us $1.287 million more than our own DPS.
Unless I'm right out of line.
But I want to digress a little bit to calls for service as an indicator of future costs.
And I think there's a huge gap between the calls for service assigned by you for calculations
to the DPS and the OPP.
And really this is the crux of all the financial statements and we need to be crystal clear
on this area.
So, page 21 of your report shows me that the calls for service for DPS, and this is not
up-to-date, this is 2019, and I understand there's some logic behind that.
So the average calls for service for annually, I guess, are 7,665.
For the OPP, they were assigned a cost of $4,917.
Now, I stand to be corrected, but I think that's a difference of 39% if I'm not mistaken.
But then if you go to the table 6 where the sample PP calls for service model lives and
down the left hand column, it appears as though there's all types of things that they
bill for.
I can't, for the life of me, understand with the exception of maybe medical calls and there
can't be that many of those. There certainly can't be 39% or roughly 3,000 medical calls
that the DPS is going to. So we've created a situation where we're grossly underestimating
the calls for service on behalf of the OPP unless there's something else. I thought, well, maybe
it's traffic violations, but no. Traffic violations is in table six. So what in the world can make
a 3,000 calls difference that we're going to get a break on. I just simply don't understand
that. Maybe you can explain it to me because if we don't get a break of 39%, it's going
to cost us an additional $880,000.
So one thing I should probably clarify, that sample table, I would have to, I don't know
that those are your numbers. It was a sample that I provided kind of so people could kind of follow
the way they do it. So I'd have to double check that on if the traffic piece is an element of that
to be quite frank with you. But certainly we can take a peek at that and see where that came from.
So for the call exercise because we knew we had to do it because we had done it for the first report,
we had kind of set the parameters for EPS to help us with that. They own the data. They have
the data system. So we had kind of given them the direction to say, can you remove calls
that would be in the OPP's purview regardless? And can you remove calls, particularly the
assistance ones that DPS would be going to in the P-wood? So they drove much of that process.
They fed us the information. So we may have to go back to DPS and get some of the details
on which ones were removed and what volumes.
I don't have it front of me here.
I can check to see the last version
they gave me and Roger me to be able to help out a little bit too.
So they drove that process.
So we'd have to double check by that volume.
I off the top of my head, I don't remember.
And again, we had them do it for us.
Because again, they've got access to the system
in the data. And again, you know, this time when when they went to the software provider optic and
said, what should we be using? It's a different data set that last time to order a magnitude is the
same, but the numbers were a little bit different. So we weren't able to really reconcile them either. So
we could ask DPS for more detailed, you know, granular summary of what was removed off the top of my
head. And I don't remember and I don't have a year in front of me. Huge financial difference. Thank you.
Thank you, Roger, then, Stephen.
Thank you, through the chair. So some of those some of those discrepancies between or differences between calls for service and
the incidents that are
billed for in the OPP billing model.
Many of those calls for service that are removed are covered off in the per-property charge that the OPP has.
So there's there's one of the sources of the differences. The other source is those calls that DPS are
are attending that the OPP just would not attend medical assistance would be a good example of that.
As Chad alluded to, all those worksheets are available, Councillor McKinnon,
and we'd be happy to share that data in more detail with Council if they're interested in looking at it.
But that was an exercise that was worked through with DDS to sort through the entire database
of occurrences that DPS pulled from our incident management system and provided both to the OPP and to MMP for analysis.
Thank you.
Thank you Roger, Steven.
Yeah, through the chair, Roger basically said exactly what I was going to say.
It's the nuance of once you're into the OPP building model is that there's two components to it.
One is the per-property cost, and I think it's roughly around, I can't remember off the top
of my head, it's roughly $100 per property, and then it's the call activity, but it's not
every single call, a significant amount, and it's probably 30-something percent calls are covered
off in that per-property charge, and then there's other calls that they then bill for.
So, I'm very confident that MNP has captured all of the calls appropriately.
Yeah, and to clarify, I got to give credit to DPS. They kind of were the worst power on that.
They really helped us mow through that. There was a lot of work there to get that figured out.
So, they kind of took the reins on it. And Catherine McKinnon alluded to the year 2020
20 for those that maybe didn't catch it. We didn't use any data or financial information
from 2020 when we met with the cost and committee at the very beginning. They determined
that 2020 was just too daunting for lots of reasons in that. There may be elements in there
that would just skew things. Certainly, we've talked to many police services where 2020 as a COVID
year has been, you know, in some ways cost it went down. I know that was the one up, calls for
service, all that kind of stuff. So we just said, let's, let's not use it. So that we're,
we're at least looking at data kind of pre-coded to the greater degree. So Council, we can't
elude it to it, but I just wanted to reiterate that.
Thank you. Councilor, are Roger?
Thank you, through the Chair. Just add to Chad's comments. That discussion was had with
with EPS leadership as well.
And 2020 really did, we're guessing due to COVID
was really a different year for calls for service.
The other issue or the other two issues
to analyze 2020, the OPP didn't request 2020 data
because of course the request for the OPP costing
came from council before the end of 2020.
And the calls for service, police and organizations, they end up closing all calls for service.
Sometimes it takes time into the year after the current year to close out all those calls for service.
So again, in discussions with DPS leadership, it was determined that trying to analyze 2020 would not be feasible.
Thank you.
Thank
you, Roger. Councilor Martin-McKinnon, did you have your hand up?
Yes, I did. Just a comment. And thank you, Chad, for your report. It's exactly what the
police cost and committee asked you for. And some of that stuff in there was designed to stimulate
conversation.
This might have started out as an OPP costing clinic, but it evolved into a
police costing clinic. And that happened because we see the numbers from the OPP command
and we say to ourselves, well, maybe our, maybe the DPS is lacking, lacking resources.
Maybe they're lacking all kinds of things over there that we can't put our finger on.
So that becomes a cost increase to the city. Either way, we're dealing with some costing
increases. So the type of stuff you put into your report is very important for us to determine
that actual fact.
As a council, we have to look at it as there's going to be a cost increase
of some kind. There's no doubt about it. And if it's a matter of resources, then we have to resolve
that the DPS. Where we have to choose to go to the OPP cost.
So those are all reasons why you can debate the cost all you want. There's going to be a cost increase to this community. And part of what your report is pointing to us is what we need to look at to get to get to that decision, hugely important to talk to DPS and the police services board next week. That's a huge part of this.
I see everybody going around and around on the questions here and debating what's wrong
with the report and those are good things to stimulate conversation that we need the
answers to before we can make a decision.
My two cents, guys.
Thank you, Councillor McKinney.
Councillor Shane McKinney.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
So, I'm looking at this report, I think I referred to it already, and that is an extract
from your 2019 report, and it's the financial summary, and I had wished that you'd really
done one for this particular report as well.
It laid everything out rather well, but not having that, I'm just trying to fill in the blank
So we have a cost from the OPP of $5.2 million plus vehicle and equipment for $710,000 plus a
seven package of $2.025 million plus I'm going to be really modest here with the building
rental parking, direct system, gun lockers, long gun vault. I put down $200,000. It could
be $1.2 or it could be a lot more than that. Over time is $200,000, $27,000 for the police
services for a court cost of $232,000. So in 2022, transition costs and things that I haven't
obviously thought about would be $8.6 million would cost us in the first year. Is that
most of being accurate. That sounds order-managed. Yeah, and you know, you brought the financial summary so we can, we didn't provide that same table only because we did more scenarios this time, but we could.
Roger has the model as well, but I could work with him on creating those for you so you'd have the details across those scenarios, but the transition costs are approximately $3 million.
dollars as you said and then the cost of the contract I think you said 5.3 so you know we
called it year zero which in financial model is pretty typical to use your kind of the start and
minute as year zero but but for all intents and purposes in year one you'd be looking at those
transition costs of three million and then the year first year contract cost of the of the 5.3 that's
correct.
The thing I like the most about this report was at the bottom it says payback period was
8.05 years. You didn't accept that at that time and now you're you're indicating it might be
eight or nine or more years. Yeah depending on the scenario so as I said I mean we didn't include
that only because we would have to include several of them but we certainly can if you find that useful
I can work with Roger on creating those because they're in the model we just have to run all the
and kind of print the copy of them.
Sir, let me think it would be a value to us.
Sure. Yeah, I can work with our own agenda.
Roger.
Thank you for the chair.
It's a little bit ironic, Councillor McKinnon, you request that
because part of this exercise was to try and slim down
the overall number of pages of the report.
I think the last time we got criticized
because the report was too long to too much data in it.
But just as Chad said,
Councillor, we can, we can provide that. They're breakdown.
We'll get it out to all the council.
Councilor McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. No, Mr. Nisby. I don't think the last report was too long. It was skewed
in the wrong way. I think, personally, as is this one, we have 18 graphics in here that
say that says, you know, we're, we're good, you know, but it's eight or 10 years away.
And like, I think a report like this, a visual for people to sit down and look at,
the bottom line is more appropriate. And this is a nice segue into things that I want to ask
you, Mr. Linda, anyway, aren't in your report. Maybe you have some indicators of whether they
were discussing. I'm just going to list them and if you don't mind. First of all is response
time. You know, is the response time for the OPP three minutes or 30 minutes? Is there
a guaranteed police presence in the community? Excuse me, Councillor McKinnon. Just one question
at a time, please.
So response time, you know, we asked this question last time too. Neither
service was tracking response time, then and weren't this time, so it wasn't factored
into our discussion. There was a factored into the report because it doesn't exist.
Thank you, Roger.
Thank you, through the Chair, just further comment on that. I agree with Councillor McKennan
on response time. I think it is an important measurement and I think it would probably lead
to, or at least, you know, be an element in the determination of additional policing
resources, if that was required. But again, coming from both services, response time,
I think response time could be tracked because they track incidents and when it's responded
to, when the call comes in. But it's not something that either service provides any type of reporting
on, at least when we asked, that was the answer that we got.
And I do understand that to a point.
Other first responder agencies, such as Fire, it's definitely easier for them to report
that because they're almost always starting from a known location.
Whereas police, if it's a busy shift, they could be at any location and trying to respond
to a call from that location. So I understand why the agency's are hesitant to report on that.
But again, I think it would be a measurement that may indicate whether or not an agency needed
additional amount or one of many. Thanks.
Thank you. But Mr. Lens, neither one reports it to date,
though, correct?
Yes, I believe that's the case, yeah. Because we asked last time too.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Councillor McKinnon, did you have another question?
A few more.
Still early.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And Mr. Linz, I just wonder because it's not in your report, whether you can flesh out
some of these services that the DPS can get from the OPP, I can tell you in the previous
life by signed the letters, getting those services. But I think I have been asked by people
or it was pointed out by people that while the OPP have this and that and the other thing
and we don't. So, you know, how can we possibly police community? Is there some way you can name
some of these services because I know I could add to that probably. Yeah, so I can't. I don't
have them in front of me, but certainly the ones that stand out are the ones that require
some of the, just the order of magnitude type of things to have the equipment in the capital
and those kind of things. I know the water rescue is one that certainly isn't their jurisdiction
as well, so I think the best thing to do, because we've got some notes on it, you know, I can get a
more detailed list of that for you and provide it.
Could we be talking about things like K9 Units and emergency response teams and helicopters
and forensic units?
Yeah.
I mean, air services.
The things that are quite capital intensive are often more challenging for a smaller service
to go out on their own and have planes and helicopters and large dedicated, as you mentioned, K9 units,
etc.
So I wouldn't want to list a bunch in this summer, say one that's incorrect, but we can certainly get those, but as you alluded to, that's the types of things that obviously they have access to, you know, so.
Yes, Roger.
Yes, through the chair. I think that is a question for the OPP, but Councilor McKinney,
if I understand you correctly, I think you're referring to those provincial services that the OPP can
provide, if that's, if I'm understanding the question correctly.
And they've, you know, in our
discussion with them, they've included a couple, you know, that would be less about their provincial
jurisdiction and just a bit more about kind of order of magnitude stuff. They have investigative
crews that can come in and take over investigation from patrol officers, for example, so those
officers can get back on patrol while that unit comes and takes that over. They did mention things
like that as well that are things that they can offer.
Okay, thank you.
Councillor McKinnon.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank you, Mr. Linz, for your patience
answering the questions, I guess the best you can. Obviously, you see that this is a very emotional issue and
as far reaching in future implications for the community and I appreciate your time.
Councillors, Mayor, any other questions, comments from Mr. Linz?
Thank you, Mr. Linz. I guess just one other comment that I have and it just maybe refers to a previous comment, but with respect to
the decision that's in front of Council. We have looked at the various factors and they are in
the report, the previous report and this report in terms of the areas of service delivery costs,
governance and benchmarking. And all of those things, all of those things, and we spent most of the
evening discussing things other than the finances, although we did talk about that, a fair bit.
But I think it's from my perspective, it's incumbent on this council because this council
ultimately makes the decision about which agency provides the policing services to the
community.
So from my perspective, it behooves all of us to understand as much as we can with respect
to service delivery cost governance and where we are and make that assessment about not only
from a cost perspective, but a service delivery perspective in terms of what we, as the leadership
in this leadership of the community, believe is the best policing service to police
Dryden going forward. From my perspective, that's the task in front of us. And again, that's the
body of basically of this report. So we obviously have a lot more work to do. We've got the Dryden
police services and the police services board coming to make a presentation next week which
time we'll have the ability to ask all the questions that we have. Then on the 24th of June we have
an open public meeting as I mentioned earlier to get public input and after all that input then
it's incumbent on the council then to make a determination at some point going forward
prior to November about which police service we choose as a council so that's
the order of business that I believe is in front of us and we have a lot of do
process to go through before we get to that decision-making point. Chad again
thank you for your presentation tonight very well done very professionally
presented and a little bit of homework to do but overall thank you for all of the
work that you and your team have done in putting this together for us.
Thank you.
It's our, it's our pleasure.
All right.
Well, let's move on to our next item.
Three members of the city's working circle at the work, our last meeting of the working
circle talked at length about the discovery of the 215 bodies at the former residential school
in British Columbia and potentially what we may want to do as a city in terms of coming
up with something for council to discuss and I'd like to ask Councillor Shane McKinnon
as co-chair of the working circle to speak to the draft statement that we put together
and put some context behind the conversation. Councillor McKinnon,
sorry I think you're
muted Councillor McKinnon.
3
Thank you, Deputy Mayor Bush and Mayor Wilson and council members on Wednesday of last week, your city of Dryden Working Circle met. And in addition to our agenda was required. And that was a response. Well, I had a city to the terrible tragedy in Canada with B.C. with the discovery of 215 children in an unmarked grave.
As we know, most council members would mention a tragic event or pay tribute during their
time at the conclusion of our meetings.
The working circle is recommending a media release by a mayor and council as leaders
in our community and is offering a draft as presented for discussion and approval.
Just on a personal note, the good work that the working circle and council have done with the upcoming renaming of Boozhu and Memorial Avenue and I want to say that Memorial Avenue in particular has taken on a whole more specific meaning for me with these revelations.
I wonder if the clerk can read the letter if that's appropriate.
You could read the letter, but I guess at the end of the day,
all of council would probably want to have a look and have some input on to the final version.
So it may, all I'm suggesting is that it may change based on either the discussion tonight or or however we go forward with it.
But I think the context of what we're trying to say is probably relevant.
So yeah, go ahead and read it.
And just recognizing that it may or may not change a little bit.
Hey, thank you.
And I'm going to apologize before we get too far into this because there's no way I'm going to be able to pronounce a few of these words.
So, the letter that was presented currently State City of Dryden Mayor and Council were deeply
saddened by the horrific discovery of the remains of 215 children buried at a former residential
school on a territory in Camelooks, British Columbia. Many of our residents and those of our
neighboring communities are survivors of residential schools or the children and grandchildren of those
survivors. We may never know, we may never fully know the harm that was done to individuals
or to the culture of our indigenous community, but we must do our utmost to ensure that this type
of racist, destructive governance never repeats itself. Dryden City Council strongly supports the
city of Dryden working circle and their work to bring our indigenous and non-indigenous community
members closer together. Their recommendations are reflective of the truth and reconciliation
report and are aligned with the goals of the Dryden Area Anti-Racism Network and other organizations
who make Dryden a better community. Treaty III territory had six residential schools.
Gord Alexander is Indian Residential School, Macintosh Indian Residential School, St. Mary's
Indian Residential School, Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, Pelican Lake Indian Residential
school, St. Margaret's Indian Residential School. The legacy of pain and suffering experienced
at these institutions did not end when they closed. These schools existed for over 100
years and Friday's discovery may not be the last. We must continue to listen and respect
the survivors of the system and found the strength and courage to bring their experiences to light.
In the interim, it is the city's goal to educate ourselves, listen to the concerns of all
citizens and ensure that Dryden is a better place to live, work, and play for everyone.
Greg Wilson, Mayor, City of Dryden.
Thank you, Madam Clerk.
So the recommendation and the goal is to come up with wording that's acceptable to counsel as a
whole and to direct staff to issue a media release as soon as possible. That's the recommendation.
So I'll show that open to the rest of Council. And who was involved in that was not the
working circle, it was the council members of the working circle that put this draft
together Michelle Price, myself and Councillor Shane McKinnon. So that's our recommendation
to council. So I'll throw it open to the rest of the council for discussion.
Council
And I can very much support the work that the work in circle.
My council members and friends have put into this statement.
It's very telling, very appropriate.
Thank you.
Mayor Rotten or Councillor Martin McKinnon, any thoughts?
Yeah, I can, I, like Dave, I can support this 100%.
I don't, I'm, I'm learning about mentioning specific schools.
I don't want to politicize this any more than it can.
It's a tragic, tragic event that we have to make sure never happens again.
But at the same time, we have to start and find ways for people to heal.
And when we constantly drag up examples, it doesn't work much for me.
but I'll support anything that anybody wants to put out.
It's a tragic, tragic event and there's, if folks like us live back in those times, this wouldn't happen. That's all I can say.
Thank you.
As I said last week, I can see us coming out with something and first I wanted to thank
the working circle for its request to mayor and council last Thursday evening to respond
to the tragic discovery of those remains of those 250 children in Kamloops the week before
in May 27th and I'd also like to thank the three councilors on the working circle committee
who put a lot of hard work into preparing a draft for public release and I what I would
like to do is just take some time this week to reflect before getting something before
council next Monday if that's acceptable.
Councillor Carlucci.
Yeah, I agree with that as well but I was going to read it. I'll go back if I'm going to
be off screen for a second here.
Can you say Army?
Yes again, we can.
Yeah, so for me I agree with Councillor Martin. We can get rid of the name at the bottom and
which says, PneC territory has six residential schools,
the legacy of paying the staff experience
in these institutions carry on from there.
I think that's where I'd like to see the change
and the rest of it do support.
So that's where I invite Matt.
That would give us, are we aligned council?
Is it acceptable to take the next four business days
essentially and probably less than that
to get it on to the agenda for next Monday?
and put out a note at the end of Council meeting next Monday.
Councilor Dave McKay,
sorry, Dave, you're on mute.
I think it's very appropriate to get it out right now and as for naming the schools,
this really brings it home for me because as a kid playing hockey, we place hockey and
At the school in Pelican Lake and I've got a cottage
over by Macintosh. It really makes you realize how
integrated this was in our area, the school system,
and how very detrimental it was for our area and
our indigenous neighbors. So I think we need to get this out.
I don't think in my mind if this is anyone way you can say this is politicizing anything this is factual. So thank you.
Other comments?
Councillor Shane McKinnon?
Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. I might have been on the same hockey team as you the back of the day. I can remember that as well, but I agree with you and I like to make a suggestion if we remove the names of the schools.
If that's more palatable for council members that we do send that out at the end of this meeting, but that's my suggestion as well.
Sorry, I just I didn't catch part of that. So you were suggesting if we remove the names of the schools and we send it out this evening, that would be my preference or as soon as possible.
Other thoughts?
Councillor Carlucci?
Yeah, I agree. If it's get out as soon as we can, the names stay if they stay if they
don't be dog time. It's a very powerful letter and I think that it needs to get out.
Councillor Price?
Thank you. I agree with Councillor McKay. I actually do believe that the names of the schools
need to stay in the presence of this letter. I think it's very important for us to recognize
the history of our community and taking it out I think removes that part of that history and
this letter in itself is very emotional for a lot of people and we've been given the task
and a very proud task of making a positive change in our community.
And this letter is telling everyone that we're here for support.
And this would be no different if this had happened to someone five years ago.
It's the same thing. We are here to support and to help heal.
And I don't think that we shouldn't neglect saying where that healing is going to and where it's coming from.
So for me, I think it's important that we leave the school names in there.
And I think it's very important that we do this here and now.
And it's not necessary to wait to say this because to me it's no different than offering condolences
is to something that will happen yesterday.
We have heard this and we're reaching out
and we're putting that out there that, you know,
what, we're here to help and to send our condolences
in any way possible that we can do as a community.
Yeah, I have to say from my perspective
that I prefer something sooner than later,
just due to the fact that the longer we wait
it just gets more and more distant in people's minds
and people move on, new stories change, etc. But I'm also in favor of, I understand, I understand
the desire maybe to put some specific names in, but I'm more comfortable just saying six residential
schools in our area and getting it out now as opposed to later.
Councillor Martin McKinnon and
and marbles and your thoughts?
Like I said, I'll support whatever you guys want.
I understand what Michelle's saying too, so.
I'm sorry I used the word politicized.
That's not how I meant it.
Let's get the letter out and let's move on.
We've got lots of work to do in this area.
We have to get, we're very functional at it right now.
We have to get even better at it.
So, let's move on, folks.
Just if I could, and my fellow councillors on the working circle can add their perspective
as well, but we have a very positive group in the working circle, the Indigenous and
non-Indigenous members.
Nobody is focusing on blame.
Everybody is focusing on what we can do moving forward in a positive manner.
Thank you so much.
And we see this, we see this letter proclamation, whatever you want to call it as just another, just another example of working together and bringing our indigenous and non-indigenous communities closer together. And so, there's not, there's really no, there's been really no politics in this discussion. It's all been about moving forward and just recognizing what happened and working with each other and recognizing that
a significant element of our population has suffered through these things in ways that
we probably can't relate to.
So could we have a vote in terms of two things, one, getting it out now versus next week
and secondly, including or not including the naming of the six residential schools?
So first, who's in favor of naming the six residential schools?
four
in favor. How about getting it out tonight or next week? Tonight,
Mayor
Wilson, can you abide by that?
Well, I believe in democracy, so majority rules.
Okay, thank you. Appreciate your support.
These are not these are not easy issues.
And unfortunately, I'd have to say that we're all living with legacies of
the past and, you know, we're all going to have to work these through probably through
our lifetimes and well into the next generation before we really start to see the kind of
progress we're all looking for.
All right.
Thank you.
Public notices.
I'll ask the Acting Clerk to review the public notice, Allison.
Thank you.
The public notice advises there'll be a virtual public consultation meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday,
June the 24th.
Members of the Dryden Police Service, OPP,
and City of Dryden staff will be in attendance
to address questions and comments from the public
regarding the OPP Costing Proposal,
which would prevent a council on May 17th.
The public can participate in the meeting
by registering to speak in advance
by emailing meeting at Dryden.ca,
no later than June 21st.
If members of the public don't want to participate in the meeting,
but would still like to provide questions or comments,
that would be read and responded to at the meeting.
They can email them to meeting at Dryden.ca or leave a voicemail message at 223-1160
also know later than June 21st.
Anyone who would like to watch the meeting will be able to access the agenda in the video on the city's website
where the video will be available at 6 p.m. on the 24th.
The video remains on the website after the meeting for anyone who's unable to watch it live.
The full public notice was available on the website in the agenda package for tonight's meeting.
Great. Thank you. Madam Clerk.
I think we've concluded all of our business for this evening.
So, Madam Clerk, could you ask for someone to move and second the motion for adjournment please?
Certainly. I'd be looking for someone to move and second the motion for adjournment.
and Councillor Price and Councillor Caroleucci.
Moved by Councillor Price, seconded by Councillor Caroleucci
that this meeting hereby adjourned.
All in favor?
Carried.
All right, thank you. We stand adjourned.
Please turn your mics off.
Night off. Thanks, everyone.
Letter, thank you.
Night off.