A sorry series of events unfolded at Shire Hall over the past couple of weeks. 

First, Councillor Corey Engelsdorfer announced a motion of non-confidence in Mayor Steve Ferguson. 

He had no choice, he explained. It was clear that the poorly planned detour route around the Wellington Main Street waterworks construction, as well as poor communication about that detour, could best be addressed by singling out the Mayor for a public dressing down. 

The next day, the Premier announced that the same Mayor, our very own Steve, was on a list of 169 municipal leaders designated for Strong Mayor powers.

The news was bizarrely apropos. Imagine being singled out for public opprobrium for a series of decisions taken by a Council on which you have exactly one vote, just like all the other councillors, and then being told that, if you like, you can have such “extended” powers.

Strong Mayor authority means that the head of council can move legislation along with the approval of just a third of councillors, rather than half. It also grants the mayor a veto in certain cases. Should a council take a decision that interferes with provincial priorities, namely the construction of housing and the infrastructure it requires, things exactly like the waterwork projects now underway in Wellington, the mayor can overturn it. 

You can imagine how this news was received by the anti-development, non-confidence contingent on Council, a group of five or six that includes, of course, the councillors for Wellington and Hillier, Mr. Engelsdorfer and Chris Braney. 

Councillor Engelsdorfer is also the publisher of the Times. That paper’s crusade against all housing and waterworks infrastructure development around the village extends, necessarily, to opposing development everywhere in the County. The one thing entails the other, or it risks looking like nimbyism, which of course it is. 

The howls of opposition went up immediately. It was “a kick in the face” to those opposed to the provincial — and municipal — priorities of building housing and infrastructure. The Mayor must not accept this expansion. The County would become “a dictatorship.”

Yet the motion had already made clear why the Mayor might have little choice but to accept, a point to which I will return. 

Amidst all of this — the non confidence motion, and the granting of Strong Mayor powers to the beleaguered Mr. Ferguson that followed fast on its heels, the CAO resigned. 

Suddenly, the popcorn one might have been enjoying at the ruckus tasted stale. The departure of Marcia Wallace is not funny at all. It’s a deadly serious turn of events, and a terrible loss to the municipality. Full stop. 

Ms. Wallace worked for the County with great intelligence, acumen, and integrity. She brought a rare form of competence. You just don’t get everything she could do in one person very often. She brought the expertise necessary to both inform complex planning decisions, and to carry them out. 

She resigned citing a toxic workplace. The details of that complaint we don’t know, of course, but the public denigration of Steve Ferguson we all witnessed last week, also a hardworking professional of enormous personal integrity, suggests what Ms. Wallace has been put through behind closed doors.

Mr. Engelsdorfer’s motion of non-confidence is really about opposition to new housing in the County. Councillor Braney was the first to speak in its favour at last week’s meeting, and his concerns quickly became clear. Employing the same fear-mongering facts and statistics published week after week in the Times, he began: 

“In February 2025, nearly 17,000 new homes were unsold in the GTA in the worst February on record for new home sales in the region, which has already seen a significant drop in activity, a 50 percent decrease in new home sales. With a looming recession on the horizon we need to pause the current infrastructure expansion before it’s too late.” 

Warning of the “financial crisis” in store for the County should its development plans proceed, he continued, “developers will sit on their properties and not develop until we see a buyer’s market and economic stability.” That means no pre-payments, no development charges, nothing to reimburse the municipality, not to mention its rate- and tax-payers, for the millions it plans to invest over the next decade to build much needed water and roads infrastructure. 

With all due respect to Councillor Braney, this is not how developers work. If they start  building now, not only will they employ hundreds of people, but their houses will be ready for sale just in time, not for a buyer’s market (arguably what we are in right now) but a seller’s market. Developers plan over the long term, not around Globe and Mail articles about the current state of real estate in the GTA.

And developers are in Prince Edward County. In Wellington, Kaitlin is waiting for the municipality to complete the waterworks infrastructure it promised. That will enable it to start the first phase of a large housing project. 

In Picton, likewise, very little development can get underway until the existing waterworks infrastructure is expanded. As in Wellington, the Picton WTP has enough capacity for about 300 new homes. About 7000 new homes are in various stages of approval. 

That limited supply also puts both water systems in contravention of provincial policy, which mandates that municipalities maintain enough capacity for three years of ready water.

But I, like the Mayor, like the (slim) majority of our councillors, and like Marcia Wallace, can keep reciting these facts until the cows come home. The councillors opposed to new development in PEC will keep insisting that if we build the infrastructure it requires we will go bankrupt. That the developers are all just pretending. That we really don’t need any new or expanded infrastructure at all. That it’s all just an elaborate plot — and a road to nowhere.

Last week’s events showed just how angry and obstructive these councillors have become. Why? Because they are losing the battle. Developers are here and they will develop. Cooler heads will continue to prevail. Council will keep voting to follow through on its commitments and its responsibilities. 

Losing the CAO that kept it all on course, however, makes staying that course much more difficult. Which makes Strong Mayor powers harder to turn down. 

The past few weeks have confirmed what many have suspected for some time. 

Something is very wrong at Shire Hall.