ROMA gives voice to rural communities
Municipalities navigate many more difficult issues today than they had in the past.
Pam Sayne, who is a representative on the Rural Ontario Municipal Association, said another hiccup with which municipal officials have to contend is a polarization in communities wrought from social media commenters.
Sayne, who is a Minden Hills township councillor, brought some highlights of ROMA’s work to Haliburton County council’s May 22 meeting.
Municipalities have had much work over the last four years to address homelessness, mental health issues in communities, aging, and a lot of federal and provincial concerns have been kicked down to the municipal level.
“We have a lot of challenges that are new to us,” she said.
That new prominence of community polarization was recently addressed at a ROMA conference. It’s a shared concern among many municipalities under the association’s umbrella.
“What’s so important to ROMA’s work is dialogue,” she said. “We can agree or disagree, but we need to continue the dialogue. And that is so fundamental to our democracy here, within our communities, and within our country as large as we are.”
The association has evolved quite a bit over the years, she said, with a guiding strategic plan developed through community consultation and representation.
“We are a board of action,” Sayne said.
That action is seen in the association’s response to growing rural demands for broadband internet, affordable housing, and working to improve access to services in the current health care crisis.
ROMA kept the wheels turning during the COVID-19 lockdown by way of online meetings that enabled representatives to maintain connection with other rural municipalities.
“That encouraged people to keep communications going and keep in touch with what was happening with other municipalities,” Sayne said. “It was a time we all managed to get through.
“It left us with a brave new world of (information technology) and how we communicate and where we get our information from.”
She said the group continues the work of getting their voice heard. Employing every avenue to get the association’s voice heard ensures it doesn’t become a trees that falls silently in the forest.
“I think it’s still important sometimes just to acknowledge and say that each of us has likely noticed that our opinions and ideas are always taken more seriously when we’re elected,” she said.
“Sometimes nobody cares what we think until we’re elected. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes an important issue.”
Councillor Bob Carter, who is the mayor of Minden Hills, said ROMA’s work gives rural centres a reach to obtain some of the resources such as housing funding that would typically go to the larger urban centres.
“The amount of money that’s coming from the senior levels of government into the rural areas is way less than we need and way less than, in all fairness, we should be getting,” Carter said.
“Many of our costs are higher because we don’t have the water and sewer and infrastructure that we would have in cities or around cities. I think ROMA plays an extremely important role and we need to do all we can to continue to support it to make sure our voice is heard.”
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James Matthews, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Minden Times
