Last week’s Council meeting was a night to remember.

It started out edgy. A lot of tense people in a huge hall. The sense that a lot was at stake.

When three uniformed police officers showed up, it didn’t even seem unwarranted. Tempers were running high. Divisions running deep. So what if most of the people there were over 65.

The locals — mostly Wellington Community Association members — were wearing blue in solidarity. Their cause? A collective fear of grave financial mismanagement on the part of Council and the leadership at Shire Hall. Their slogan for months has been Just Press Pause. A polite way of saying Just Say No. “I’m not against development,” speaker after speaker stated, “but it has to be managed and careful development.”

Fair enough.

The worry is that the municipality will keep insisting Growth pays for Growth — while adding to an already worrying debt load by building wildly ambitious infrastructure for developers who will never actually develop. No upfront charges, no development charges, no connection charges, no nothing coming to foot the spiraling bills.

For its part, the municipality insists the numbers make sense. They have the builders. They have the approvals. They have the evidence to warrant the plans. Still, those are not actual contracts. Development Charges don’t come pouring in until a building permit is issued. The WCA wants absolute certainty. The bulldozers at work at Base31 and Port Picton and West Meadows, the plans underway for Cork and Vine: not enough.

The builders, however, were at the meeting. Kaitlin, Picton Heights, Port Picton Homes, DECO Communities and Rockport Group of PEC Community Partners and Base31 — the CEOs and VPs came to make formal deputations. 

In among the Council agenda documents was a chart showing who is about to build now, who in ten years. Between 2025 and 2032, Shire Hall expects 4200 new homes across Picton and Wellington. Another 4500 are on the books for the decade after. (We reproduce this chart on page 3.)

I don’t believe for a second that developers are here to spin their wheels. Even if they wanted to, the banks and other lenders on which they rely, such as the ultra-conservative CMHC, would not let them. They need to raise millions to finance their projects, and those millions only ever come with pragmatic business proposals.

I also firmly believe in the leadership at Shire Hall. That leadership was on display last week. It, rather than any “side,” won the day, forging a clear consensus on what has been a divided council, and clearing a path forward. The tender to construct the final piece of the water servicing for the Cork and Vine development was approved 8-6. The most contentious vote, on starting the design process for a new, regional WTP in Wellington, was even stronger, 9-5. While both waterworks motions passed, both were also amended in some way — there was a spirit of compromise at work, a willingness to meet halfway, to agree on essentials.

These firmly majority votes are important. They show a Council moving toward a consensus.

Everything was moving along, until a final Just Press Pause motion came to the floor, moved by Corey Engelsdorfer.

Mr. Engelsdorfer is a councillor for Wellington and the publisher of the Times. His newspaper has been floating the doom and gloom argument for years now.

The motion was bound to be divisive. It asked that Council rescind the votes it had just made, in effect, in a final non-confidence motion.

It preyed on the long history of votes on waterworks infrastructure that have split this Council firmly down the middle in the past. Half opposed. Half in favour. Lately the “in favour” side has been losing ground and the opposed side has been gaining. That’s why this meeting was anticipated to be so fractious, the votes so precarious.

One side or the other can win on a key issue these days if just one councillor fails to show up. That’s the definition of dysfunctional.

Crucial decisions are being made, not by a set of 14 representatives faithfully reading documents, listening to the arguments, and coming to an informed consensus. Instead, there’s hostility around the horseshoe, empty slogans, and tempers running high, as though rival teams are coming to face off week after week.

But other than asking for everything to stop, immediately, the Just Press Pause motion looked for some sound financial and project management to be put in place. It asked that major studies, such as a regional development charges framework, be completed before moving to the next stage. That communications be clear and straightforward, not buried in 100-page reports.

A simple amendment, spearheaded by the CAO, Marcia Wallace, asked that the first phrase, about stopping everything immediately, be struck, because the rest looked just fine.

A “pause” on works already underway jeopardizes projects on which huge outlays have been made, and sends a disaster message to developers with millions on the line. No waterworks means no development. No development, no financing. No financing, and the developers disappear.

But if the phrase could be amended to pressing pause on work to come, she stressed, so a financial and project management framework could be developed, she would welcome such a space.

It was elegantly done. It created common ground between those opposed and those in favour. Most important, it united Council around the next phase: moving ahead.

The final vote was 12-2. Council will send out the tenders and continue the work it has underway to honour its commitment to development, and create a strategic financial and management plan for the future.

A community only flourishes when it comes together on key issues. If PEC is going to have development, and it clearly is, then the question is pressing: what is that development going to look like?

While Council wastes precious time and energy on a smoke and mirrors argument about whether developers are going to develop, that development has been proceeding apace. A revised Zoning By-Law has gone through draft after draft, setting a blueprint for development in PEC, with scarcely a public glance. Applications for draft subdivision approval are so fast and furious, we cannot keep up. Luckily, the Gazette just hired a new reporter whose dedicated beat is Development in Prince Edward County.

What are all these new communities going to look like? Where are they going to be? What is going to be destroyed to make way for them? Who are they being built for?

These are the real questions, and they are going by the wayside.