Brett Thoms
Campbell’s Bay October 19, 2022
The MRC Pontiac held its monthly public meeting at the MRC headquarters in Campbell’s Bay last Wednesday. Here are some notable moments from the meeting.
The meeting opened with a tribute honouring the recently deceased Mayor of Campbell’s Bay, Maurice Beauregard, where every mayor spoke about him followed by a moment of silence.
A resolution calling for the MRC Pontiac to be added to a list of regions eligible for a community forest run by the province of Quebec was also dedicated to Beauregard, who Warden Toller referred to as the champion for forestry in the Pontiac.
Public transit
The MRC passed various resolutions concerning . . .
expanding public transport in the Pontiac, which run through TransporAction Pontiac.
The first confirmed that the MRC Pontiac council of Mayors approved the MRC’s participation in the Paratransit Subsidy Program offered by the MTQ . The resolution laid out that there had been 12,990 paratransit trips made by TransporAction in 2021 and it is expected that there will be 18,996 by the end of 2022. The resolution stated that the MRCs financial contribution had been $118,300.
A second resolution was passed requesting three grants of $100,000 each for 2022, 2023 and 2024 in order to improve public transportation services in the Pontiac.
Finally, a third resolution adopted the budget of TransporAction of 2022 – 2025 in which the MRC will contribute $25,000 each year.
Finance
A resolution was passed approving funding from the second component of the Regions and Rurality Fund (FRR), which is money provided to the MRC by the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l’Habitation.
Toller, Mayor Colleen Larivière, Mayor Christine Francoeur and Mayor Bill McCleary all had to recuse themselves from the room while the vote was taken due to their presence on the boards of some of the recipient organizations.
Here is a list of the organization and the amount of funding they received:
Amies du manoir St-Joseph – $70,000
Bouffe Pontiac – $17,331.48
Campbell’s Bay Golden Age Club – $4,876.00
Fort-Coulonge Golden age Club – $14,181.55
Le Patro – Aquatic Project – $30,353.00
Pontiac Lions Club – $35,072.40
Pontiac Community Players – $11,541.65
Villa James Shaw – $32,800.00
Town of Bryson – $84,266.00
Municipality of Mansfield – $13,285.64
In total 15 projects were submitted for funding for a total of $585,039.34 in grants, however 13 were declared eligible for funding and only 11 were selected for funding by the committee in charge of distributing the funds.
In total $417,707.72 was given to the 11 chosen projects from the Regions and Rurality Fund (FRR) during this component.
Another resolution allocated $75,000 to the firm RelèvÉval for “technical work in maintenance and calculations.”
CFP
Another resolution which saw some discussion was a one that signed off a deal negotiated between Xplore (formerly Xplornet) and Connexion Fibre Picanoc (CFP), an internet utility partly owned by the MRC Pontiac.
The deal allowed 57 kilometres of fibre optic infrastructure between Otter Lake and Gracefield to be rented and used out for a year by Xplore for one year. Under the deal Xplore will pay $1 per metre for a total of $57,000.
The $57,000 will go to maintenance and possibly provide a small amount of surplus revenue for CFP, according to Toller, who also sits on the board of CFP.
There was confusion amongst the council on what this deal meant for the ongoing discussions over a potential sale of the CFPs infrastructure. However, Bernard Roy, the director of the MRC Pontiac, explained that this was separate from any sale agreement.
The council was also assured that the legal due diligence had been done by CFP, and that they were getting the same deal as the one negotiated by the MRC Vallée de la Gatineau.
You can watch the whole the meeting on the MRC’s Facebook page.
