Every question, answered in public

Questions from Ed Vander Vegte

The email below was sent to me by Wainfleet resident Ed Vander Vegte, who has given his permission to post it here in full along with my answers. His contact information has been removed for privacy.

What are your views on making Wainfleet an attractive place for tourism, and Airbnb?

My answer: Tourism is one of the few economic engines a township like ours actually has, and the last council came close to switching it off. Over the past months I've sat down with the people who live off our visitor season: the chocolate shop, the ice cream shops, realtors, cleaners, landscapers, farm stands, handymen, restaurant owners and more. Business after business told me the same thing: when the Township went after short-term rentals the way it did, the visitors stopped coming, and their livelihoods were decimated along with them. Nobody I spoke with wants party houses. Neither do I. But there is a way to stop a handful of problem properties without devastating an entire community's economy: enforce against behaviour, not against tourism itself.

Now, the part I owe you before my opinion goes any further, because you may have already seen it in the news: I own lakeshore property here. When the Township brought in its STR rules, I voluntarily disclosed four weekend bookings, every one of them booked a year before the by-law took effect. The Township treated my honest disclosure as an admission of guilt and fined me amounts so far out of proportion that the story made national news, with millions of views online. I'm the leader of a group of approximately 30 people who are suing Wainfleet for illegalities with their bylaws and their enforcement tactics. I'm not telling you that for sympathy; I'm telling you because you deserve to hear it from me, not from a headline. Because of that history, I am seeking a formal independent opinion on exactly where a conflict of interest begins and ends for me as a councillor, and I will follow it to the letter: declaring my interest and stepping aside from any STR vote the law requires. I will not use a council seat to fight my own case.

My rationale: A township that fines honest disclosure teaches every resident to stop being honest, and a township that treats every visitor as a nuisance teaches every visitor to spend their money in Port Colborne instead. The costs aren't only borne by the businesses: the Township's own budget shows roughly $458,000 in by-law legal fees over three years, and $277,155 in fines collected in 2024 against a $30,000 budget. When enforcement becomes a revenue line, something has gone wrong with the purpose of it. Whatever your view of Airbnb, that program deserves a line-by-line review in the open, and Wainfleet deserves a council that sees its beaches, it's farms and its small businesses as things to grow, not things to police.

What are your views on allowing decent supplementary homes or additions to allow a comfortable place for parents to live in if the property size decently allows it?

My answer: I support small, responsible growth: about 300 buildings over four years, and a comfortable secondary home or addition for your parents or to create rental income, where the property can support it, is exactly the kind of growth I mean. I grew up in Waterdown in the 70s and early 80s, when it was peaceful and spacious and we fished the creeks for trout. I moved to Burlington at 14, met my wife in high school there, and watched Burlington grow as busy and congested as Toronto over the years. I moved to Wainfleet five years ago to get away from exactly that, so believe me when I say I will never vote to turn this township into what I left. But look at the map: Wainfleet is 21,753 hectares. Port Colborne next door is 12,199 hectares and houses 20,000 people; we are nearly twice the land with about a third of the people. Provincial law is already on your side for additional units; the practical limits in rural Wainfleet are septic, well and floodplain, not council's mood. The Township's job should be to help you get to yes: a plain-English guide to what your lot allows, a published permit timeline, and staff whose first instinct is to help.

My rationale: The reason for 300 is the tax pool. Wainfleet spreads a $10.25 million levy across only about 3,100 dwellings, which is why every household's share is so high. Three hundred new buildings would add roughly a million dollars a year to the tax base, money we badly need, because my goal is to stop the annual increases and start bringing the burden down, not by cutting services but by having more families share the load. I know 300 in four years is a challenge; I'd rather set an honest target and chase it than pretend the problem solves itself. Spread across our massive land base, that's roughly one new building per kilometre of road. It won't change traffic or congestion in any way you'd notice, but it will bring more families to support the school, the arena, the fair and the small businesses that make this a town at all.

What are your views on working with the Niagara Region?

My answer: Work with the Region where it saves Wainfleet money, and push back hard where it costs us. But I want to give you a straight answer about how that actually works now, because the rules just changed and I'm not sure every candidate has noticed. Starting with this election, the Province has cut the regional council down to the twelve mayors plus a provincially appointed chair. Wainfleet's four councillors will hold no seat at the Region at all; our township of 6,900 gets one voice in that room, our mayor, sitting beside the mayors of St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. So a councillor who tells you they'll "fight for you at the Region" is describing a room they won't be in. What a councillor can actually do, and what I will do, is make sure our one voice walks in prepared: council resolutions that give the mayor a clear, evidence-backed mandate on every regional file that touches us, from policing costs to waste to regional roads; formal Township advocacy positions on the record, so Wainfleet's position is public and can't be quietly traded away; and doing the homework, because the councillor who reads the regional budget line by line is the one who arms our mayor with something better than talking points. The second track is our neighbours: I want a formal shared-services review, starting with Port Colborne ten minutes away, because a township our size doesn't need to own and staff everything itself, and those deals are made township to township, no Region required.

My rationale: Roughly 40 percent of your residential tax rate is the Region's, more than the Township's own share, so a councillor who only watches Wainfleet's portion of your bill is watching less than half the problem. Under the new structure, small municipalities like ours keep the same one seat while representing a fraction of the population of the cities, which means Wainfleet wins regional arguments on preparation and evidence or not at all. That happens to be the thing I do for a living. And the shared-services file matters more than ever: the fixed costs of fire, roads, planning and the library are spread across too few people here, and sharing them with a neighbour is the one structural fix that doesn't depend on winning a vote in a room we're barely in.

Do you consider the current town management to be doing a good job of spending our money and providing reliable services?

My answer: No. The mayor and council are doing a horrible job of managing this township, and people are fed up. You said you're constantly disgusted with the current council; you are far from alone. I've spoken with well over a hundred residents so far and I'm still talking with 15 to 20 more every day, on porches, at fence lines and in driveways across Wainfleet, and the common theme is unmistakable: people want a full change. That means a new mayor and four new councillors. The record backs the frustration up. Wainfleet has raised its levy faster than every neighbouring municipality for five straight years (5.35, 5.97, 5.93, 5.66 and 4.98 percent) while Pelham, West Lincoln, Port Colborne, Welland and Fort Erie all held between 3.5 and 4 percent this year. We collect almost the same total levy as West Lincoln with less than half their population. And despite all those increases, our roads are reinvested at about a third of what the Township's own engineers say they need. That is not good stewardship, and I'm running to change it: a line-by-line review, published publicly, starting with cemetery operations, in-house drainage, by-law legal spending, and the gap between what we budget for wages and what we actually pay.

My rationale: My criticism is aimed where the decisions are made: the council table, not the front counter. I run a business; when the numbers drift year after year, you change the decision-makers, not the payroll clerk. Every figure above comes from the Township's own budget documents and West Lincoln's, and all of it is cited on my website, because if I'm asking for your vote on the numbers, you should be able to check the numbers yourself.

The quality of our roads, or lack thereof.

My answer: You're right about the roads, and the Township's own Asset Management Plan agrees with you: 34 percent of our road network's value is in poor or very poor condition, our asphalt roads average nearly 80 years old, and the reinvestment rate has run at about a third of what the Township's own engineers call for. Here is my approach. I want a tax cut, and I want a measured, professional approach to where every tax dollar goes. Those two goals are not in conflict; they are the same discipline. There is waste everywhere in this budget, and waste that gets found and fixed becomes money for the services people are actually asking for. Roads will be a big part of that. On the roads themselves, I don't believe in spreading money like peanut butter: I want an engineering-based review of the whole network to decide which roads need servicing first, published so you can see where your road sits on the list and why. Fix the worst first, fix them properly, and report progress every year.

My rationale: This is how I've run a business for 25 years: you don't fix a cost problem by writing bigger cheques, you fix it by finding out where the money is going. The Township's own budget shows where to look: roughly half a million a year in legal and professional fees, cemetery operations staffed and equipped in-house while our neighbour contracts theirs for a fifth of the cost, by-law enforcement running six times West Lincoln's cost per resident, and wages budgeted 23 percent above what was actually paid the year before. Fix waste like that and you can service the roads that need it and give taxpayers relief, because the goal of finding money was never to grow the budget; it was to stop taking more of yours every year.

Have a question of your own for Scott Wilson? Ask it, and I will answer it here in public, whether I like the question or not.

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