Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

A majority of Pontiac’s mayors have voted in favour of pursuing legal action to collect the municipal shares the MRC is still owed by the Municipality of Alleyn and Cawood for 2024.

At the council of mayors’ monthly meeting on Jan. 22, a motion was passed to mandate law firm Deveau Dufour Mottet Avocats to begin legal proceedings to recover the $289,148 owed in shares, as well as the interest accumulated over the past year at a rate of two per cent a month, and costs the MRC will accrue through this legal action, at a rate of about $200 an hour.

Municipal shares, paid by municipalities to the MRC for shared services like animal control, public security, public transit services and the MRC’s property assessment department, are determined by each municipality’s assessed property value in a given year.

In the first of every three years of the property assessment cycle, an in-depth evaluation determines accurate values of properties depending on whether they are residential, forestry, vacant, or cottage lots. In years two and three of the cycle however, these categories are ignored and a generalized evaluation produces a standardized value, based on all sales across the municipality.

Alleyn and Cawood’s standardized value increased by over 200 per cent in 2024, after a collection of empty lots were sold at about four times their assessed value. This inflated standardized value caused its municipal shares to increase from $112,539 in 2023 to $289,148 in 2024.

But this spike, says Alleyn and Cawood’s director general Isabelle Cardinal, was based on a flawed evaluation system, which is why her municipality has refused to pay the full sum of last year’s shares.

“How can a small municipality like Alleyn and Cawood have one of the biggest bills for shares in the Pontiac [ . . . ] a bill similar to [Pontiac’s] big municipalities?” Cardinal asked.

“We were charged on a flawed, exaggerated number. [ . . . ] You can see, just by comparing the shares of Alleyn and Cawood for the last three years,” she said, noting the shares owed for 2025 are back down to $147,126, much closer to what they were for 2023.

“So it’s pretty clear that something wrong happened,” she said.

In the fall, the municipality passed a resolution, sent to the MRC for consideration, that offered to pay just over half of the amount owed for its 2024 shares – a number based on the more accurate property assessment it received in the fall of 2024 – on the condition the MRC cover the remaining amount using its budget surplus. The municipality did not receive a response from the MRC regarding this proposal, so it did not follow through on paying a portion of the money owed.

But from the MRC’s perspective, this money has already been spoken for, as allocated in the 2024 budget which was approved by Alleyn and Cawood mayor Carl Mayer in Nov. 2023.

“Unfortunately the mayor of Alleyn and Cawood supported it, and his DG also knew that’s how much [their share] was,” said MRC Pontiac warden Jane Toller.

“They’ve had ample time to pay, as they’ve paid every other year. [ . . . ] We’ve tried to have conversations directly, and I personally reached out to them the last week of December, knowing the 31st was the deadline we’d imposed [on payment].”

She said her attempts to get the municipality to pay a portion of their shares were not successful.

On the question of using a portion of the MRC’s surplus to help Alleyn and Cawood pay its share, Toller said the MRC had been advised by its accountant to keep a surplus of at least $2 million.

“We made a decision that it would not come from the surplus, but we are in agreement that this money, if it comes from anywhere to help Alleyn and Cawood, it should come from the provincial government,” Toller said.

‘Somebody’s got to fight them’

At Wednesday evening’s council meeting, most mayors voted in favour of the motion to pursue legal action to collect the money owed, while Otter Lake mayor Jennifer Quaile, Thorne pro-mayor Robert Wills and Alleyn and Cawood mayor Carl Mayer voted against it.

“If we lose, we lose. We’ll pay it all,” Mayer told THE EQUITY following the meeting, noting the municipality has the money and could pay the sum of its 2024 shares today if needed. But for Mayer and the council, the refusal to do so is one based in principle.

Since the summer, the municipality has been advocating the MRC change how it calculates its municipal shares so that municipalities aren’t charged based on generalized property valuations produced in years two and three of the evaluation cycle, and base shares instead on the detailed evaluations done in year one.

In December the MRC adopted a new bylaw that modified the way shares are calculated, basing 50 per cent of the total on year one evaluations, and 50 per cent on a municipality’s standardized value. But this bylaw did not change what Alleyn and Cawood owes the MRC for 2024.

“Somebody’s got to fight them to get them to make change,” Mayer said. “Even though we’re a small municipality, we’re going to fight it.”

He said the municipality has set money aside in its 2025 budget for legal fees in anticipation of this potential legal challenge, which means this year’s budget includes less money for road maintenance and upgrades to the community’s Henry Heeney Memorial Park. Mayer said the residents are backing the municipality in this decision, a point Cardinal echoed.

“We’ve been transparent with our ratepayers, we’ve been transparent throughout this whole thing,” she said.

“They know, they’re supporting us, we’re really lucky to have the community we have.”