The municipalities of Sheenboro, Chichester and L’Isle-aux-Allumettes have received a provincial grant to help them design a plan to share key municipal services.
Quebec’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MAMH) is awarding the municipalities $525,000 to be used for merging administrative, public works and waste management services.
All three councils passed resolutions in summer 2025 in favour of this project. Currently, Chichester and L’Isle-aux-Allumettes share an administration staff separate from Sheenboro, while each municipality handles its own public works and waste management.
“The objective of the project is to harmonize tools and procedures between the municipalities, to pool services related to public works, residual materials management, and municipal administration, to improve administrative efficiency, to promote staff professionalization and specialization, and to enhance the quality, accessibility, and reliability of services,” explains the joint press release from the municipalities announcing that they received the grant.
The funding will cover 75 per cent of the $750,000 cost associated with this project. The municipalities are to contribute the remaining 25 per cent.
“From a council’s perspective, we looked at this as a chance to save costs if we worked together,” said L’Isle-aux-Allumettes mayor Corey Spence, explaining why his council decided to pursue this funding. “Sometimes where the cost savings are not there, the service improvement is.”
The mayors of Sheenboro and Chichester declined to comment.
Alicia Jones, director general for the municipalities of Chichester and L’Isle-aux-Allumettes, said the funding can be used for a number of costs that could arise in the merging of services, including new equipment or consulting fees associated with merging administrations.
“We’re probably going to do it in a phased approach. We have three years to implement it, from the time of our application which was August 2025. I anticipate this will be all up and running by 2027.”
She said the first step in this project will be to create an agreement for how the municipalities will share services. This will be done by a working committee made up of the mayor, two councillors, and the director general of each municipality that will meet on average every two weeks over the next six months to negotiate the details of how services will be shared.
“We’ve already had one meeting, and it was four hours long. And we were in the weeds. Are we sharing that screwdriver? It’s that much that they’re going into detail.” Jones said.
She said so far, discussions between the municipalities have focused on waste management services, looking at the possibility of sharing a transfer site. The committee’s second meeting was held Mar. 30.
“We went through [meetings like this] when we merged the fire departments 10 years ago, so I know the exercise can be lengthy, but it has to be done, because we can’t really move forward with any sharing of staff or equipment until we have a signed agreement.”
Spence said he believed the biggest hurdle in working out the shared services agreement will be when it comes to sharing administrative staff.
“I’m anticipating we’ll have the cost sharing model for waste management done pretty easily, and I would anticipate the same thing for public works. For administration it’s a little more nuanced.”
Amalgamation study to come
To receive the full amount available through this MAMH grant, the municipalities had to agree to undergo an amalgamation study at the same time.
“So not only are we negotiating to share services, which is not amalgamation, we also have to do a study, which is led by Municipal Affairs, to look at amalgamation,” Jones said, noting public consultations will be an important component of this study.
The press release notes the study will “examine the advantages, challenges, and potential impacts of a possible municipal amalgamation” and reinforces that “the completion of this study does not mean that a municipal amalgamation has been decided. It is simply an analysis. The purpose of the study is to provide objective information that may assist municipal councils in their future decisions.”
Spence said he’s looking forward to having this study completed so he can hear from residents about what they think of the question of amalgamation, once they have the data.
“We can let the citizens decide,” he said. “In reality, if you take a look at it, there’s not a whole lot left once we do all these shared services. If people still want to have all these councillors making decisions for their little municipalities, that’s fine too.”
