By Stephen Kimber
January 27, 2008
Well, it’s a start
Members of Cumberland County’s municipal council voted unanimously on Wednesday to say yes to a request from the towns of Amherst, Springhill, Parrsboro and Oxford to meet to begin to talk… well, about talking about the future of fire services in the region.
The various governments have been trying and failing for months to negotiate a new deal so Amherst would continue provide fire services to county communities.
When the last deal was signed three years ago, the county paid just $122,000 a year to cover the extra costs for Amherst firefighters. Amherst says it now wants the municipality to ante up $286,000 a year while he municipality has countered with $190,000.
And… Well, there the matter stands.
In December, Amherst council voted to cut off the fire hoses effective July 1, 2008.
Even as the clock ticks down, Amherst and municipal officials have continued to trade insults — some Amherst councillors think the county low-balled them because it wants to set up its own fire department “as a means of partially justifying the existence of its fire services co-ordinator position” — while not getting a deal done.
While local mayors expressed cautious optimism about the face-to-face meeting scheduled for next week, Municipal Warden Keith Hunter says Amherst’s latest offer of “minor alterations” to its original proposal won’t likely be enough to break the impasse.
“Unless Amherst is willing to give a lot more than minor [alterations],” he told the Amherst Daily News, “there are no negotiations to be had with the Town of Amherst.”
Any other business? Meeting adjourned.
Good, better…
Health Minister Chris d’Entremont finally got to preside over a good news health care story last week — and perhaps reap a little political reward in the bargain.
“Here is where the quality of health care begins,” d’Entremonet told a crowd of 40 people who’d come to celebrate the official opening of the Harbour South Medical Clinic in his Yarmouth birthplace last week.
The clinic will employ up to eight doctors as well as nurse practitioners, and offer primary care as well as health education. The hope is that its presence will cut down on patient wait times as well as free up beds in the Yarmouth Regional Hospital.
But its opening dovetailed neatly with a recent consultants’ report urging the province to rethink the way it delivers health care.
“Clinics like this are as important as big hospitals,” d'Entremont explained, adding that people are currently going to a hospital “for very basic services. We need to get them out and have services close to home. That's what this clinic is — it's in the community, it's more responsive to the needs for those patients.”
“People who used to come here left feeling good,” Mayor Charles Crosby added in his remarks, noting that the clinic’s Main Street location once served as a liquor store. “Now, they'll leave feeling better.”
After his week in the negative glare of the cuts-are-coming spotlight, we’re guessing that Chris d’Entremont sure did.
Meanwhile…
Health care administrators, professionals and citizens around the province were still sorting out their reactions to last week’s far-reaching $1-million Corpus Sanchez report on the future of health care.
That report, two years in the making, not only came up with 103 recommendations for ensuring “sustainability through transformation” of the health care system province-wide, but it also added dozens of others aimed specifically at individual regional health care authorities and institutions.
Some of those recommendations will inevitably lead to reduced services in rural areas.
Perhaps that explains why the immediate consensus reaction to the report seemed to be, “Yes, but…”
The principles are fine, but don’t mess with our ER. And don’t rush into anything.
David Irvine, who heads a local physician-recruiting group called Medical Emergency-Digby in Crisis (MEDIC), told the Digby Courier his group made many of the same arguments for change — “like team approaches to primary care, and an end to doctors being the be all and end all” — seven years ago. But the government did little about them.
He says he’s surprised the MacDonald government is now suggesting it will implement all 103 recommendations in the report in just three years, especially since consultations on the report are expected to take at least a year.
“I have a copy of the report here beside me,” he explained. “It’s three centimeters thick, over an inch. There’s a lot of stuff in it, but the devil is in the details.”
Indeed.
Speaking of details
Digby General Hospital administrator Judy LeBlanc has been busy this past week fielding angry calls from local residents who believe she’s kicked Dr. Roy Harding’s biweekly clinics out of the hospital.
Not so, she insists.
Harding, the hospital’s former medical director and a popular family doctor who resigned in June, has been operating walk-in clinics out of his own former offices in the hospital. In early January, LeBlanc told him he’d have to move because the hospital needed to renovate the space for soon-to-be hired nurse practitioners.
LeBlanc says that using the hospital offices for the clinic was always intended as an short-term solution, and added that she’s already found a new home for Harding at the nearby Bear River Community Health Clinic.
In fact, she says the Bear River facility — which she and Harding had discussed as a possible location from the beginning — is better suited for the kind of clinics he is providing.
Still, she knows some Digby residents aren’t happy with having to travel to Bear River. “I hope people will understand he didn’t get kicked out,” she told the newspaper hopefully.
Ah, country living
A loose coalition of Annapolis Valley towns, community organizations and residents has launched a campaign “to be able to enjoy our backyards and our families and not be invaded by unwanted intrusions.” Those intruders include ATVs, OHVs and all manner of noisy, motorized vehicles currently roaring along pristine wooded trails in their communities.
Bob Connell, the organizer of the fledgling Coalition for Quiet Living, told the Annapolis County Spectator he’s been “feeling out people that I felt were like-minded,” and discovered a lot of people are.
His own Cambridge-based Cornwallis River Pathways Society is currently trying to get permission to develop a six-kilometre section of an abandoned local rail bed as an exclsuively non-motorized trail.
It may not be easy.
Annapolis Royal Mayor John Kinsella, whose council is on record supporting the idea of the pedestrian trail, says he was disappointed when the province’s Office of Health Promotion and Protection recently came out in support of allowing vehicles to share the walking path because, as officals explained in a letter to the town, “the geography does not readily provide for easy and inexpensive answers for an alternate route” for motorized vehicles.
“How is it that the office of Health Protection and Promotion is advocating for the use of ATVs?” asks Kinsella. “Is that a healthy activity?”
How do you define criminal?
Westville’s board of police commissioners says there are inaccuracies in a scathing provincial Justice Department report that criticizes the way it does its business, but acting board chair Ray Cameron wouldn’t say what those inaccuracies are. Board members also say some of the media reporting about the report itself has been inaccurate too but they refused to be specific about that either.
And that’s the way the board’s first public meeting to consider its response to Justice Minister Cecil Clarke’s report played out last week.
The report claimed the board — with seven members managing a six-member police force — was dysfunctional, that it meddled in day-to-day department operations and that two of its members had criminal records, which is a no-no under the province’s Police Act.
It was that last issue that seemed to dominate discussion at the meeting. In the end, the board agreed to write a letter to the Justice Minister asking him to “define” criminal conviction as well as to publicly identify the two individuals who tested positive for criminal convictions.
Despite its disagreements with the report, however, Cameron insisted to the New Glasgow News that “we certainly have to do what the minister asks, and we intend to do that,” adding, “I'm sure everything can be straightened out to everybody's advantage.”
The board has until Feb. 15 to craft its response.
It sounds like it will need every day of that time.
Home business
A Shelburne County fisherman thought he’d found the perfect way to generate a little extra income.
Using his home computer, he managed to create a much-prized — but also very much forged — Area 33 lobster license, which he then leased to another fisherman for $5,000, plus 20 per cent of his catch.
The scheme was working just fine until Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers got suspicious while conducting a routine check of the man’s license.
Three days later, 10 officers swooped down on Joey Oikle’s house, seizing documents and a computer.
Earlier this month, Oikle pleaded guilty to three charges including fraud and “fishing with a license without being named in the license.” The court fined him $8,150 and ordered him to pay back $8,850 he’d managed to make on his fake license scam.
No word on whether officials gave him back his computer.
http://www.stephenkimber.com/
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Annapolis County Spectator, Digby Courier, New Glasgow News, Shelburne Coastguard, Yarmouth Vanguard.
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