Joint Fire Services Committee: Lincoln mirrors Grimsby’s move

By Tristan Marks
NewsNow

The Town of Lincoln has has taken another series of steps on the path of merging its fire service with the Town of Grimsby’s.
Council passed several joint fire service bylaws at a Sept. 7 special council meeting including the appointments of Councillors Greg Reimer, Mike Mikolic and JD Pachereva as Lincoln’s voting members on the advisory committee.

Most items passed without any discussion, however, debate arose surrounding the committee membership.

Coun. Adam Russell requested an amendment “for continuity” that changed the composition of the voting members of the committee.

Rather than having eight voting members – the mayors, CAOs and two councillors from each municipality, Russell’s amendment asked for six voting members to be made up of three elected representatives from each Town. Both CAOs would remain on the advisory committee as non-voting members.

Russell said after the meeting that his intent was to make sure Lincoln’s bylaw matched its counterpart from Grimsby, which was to process a similar motion the same night.

“It sounds like this is what Grimsby did as well,” he said.

Before council voted on Russell’s amendment, Coun. Paul MacPherson noted concern that the wording of the initially proposed bylaw did not match what council originally discussed in June.

He said the original report voted on defined the advisory committee as three members of each council, rather than the mayors with two members of council as was worded in the bylaw on the night’s agenda.

MacPherson said defining a position to a specific member of council would require a vote to reconsider. This sparked a debate with Mayor Sandra Easton, who disagreed.

“This is a matter of what the clerk’s intentions were when she brought this forward [in June], because there was clearly work to be done on it,” she said.

However, Easton eventually ruled in favour of MacPherson’s contention, and a vote to reconsider was held.

Councillors Pachereva, Mikolic and Reimer nominated themselves, and Coun. Lynn Timmers nominated Mayor Easton with Pachereva, Mikolic and Reimer winning the vote.