By Jeff Gard
A notice of motion on Cobourg council's agenda Monday night from Mayor Lucas Cleveland regarding the introduction of a non-resident waterfront seasonal parking pass was expected to be referred to the April 24 committee-of-the-whole meeting, but ended up being approved on the spot.
Valid from Victoria Day until Thanksgiving, the $150 seasonal pass will be available to anyone outside of the town's limits.
In February, council considered a memo from Director of Public Works Laurie Wills regarding the 2022 Waterfront Parking Update and Public Feedback Review and had two options; provide direction to staff for any proposed changes to the waterfront parking strategy in 2023 or continue with the strategy for another year with additional communications and education to further promote discounted resident passes. That meant the only passes available were $40 seasonal passes for Cobourg residents (or $20 for east beach area residents) as well as $40 daily waterfront passes.
While the option of a non-resident pass was included in the staff report, council voted to extend the current parking strategy for another year. Councillor Adam Bureau was the only vote in opposition.
Monday night, Cleveland, who had passed the chair over to Deputy Mayor Nicole Beatty, wished to address the motion. Beatty said because the vote would just be to forward the motion to the next meeting, the mayor would have to request to suspend the rules of order if he wished to address it.
He made that request and it was approved by council.
“I'd like to give credit where credit's due. Councillor Bureau was definitely persuasive in speaking to this on behalf of the citizens and definitely was instrumental in sort of addressing the concerns,” Mayor Cleveland said. “What precipitated was me then speaking to staff about possibilities of what could and couldn't be introduced, how we could find sort of a common ground specifically to address the continual e-mails and complaints from those just on the borders of Cobourg – those in Hamilton Township, those in Port Hope who want to come to Cobourg, who want to spend their summers here and felt that $40 a day was just a little bit insurmountable.”
Mayor Cleveland considered the non-resident pass to be an opportunity to encourage tourism, especially from other residents of Northumberland County.
Deputy Mayor Beatty said she was in full support of the motion and asked Director Wills to remind council of the definition of non-resident as it related to Northumberland and beyond.
“It is understood to be...for all non-residents, not limited to the County. I did have that in our waterfront parking update report that we did look into just having a County pass, but because of the logistics involved with getting all of the information for every resident in the County of Northumberland, it would just not be possible to have all that information put into our system. It was challenging enough just to get all that information for the town itself,” Wills remarked.
Wills said there's no requirement to provide an address when purchasing the pass, rather just a licence plate number and method of payment.
Councillor Randy Barber wondered if a family had multiple vehicles, could the pass be shared.
“Any pass that we get has to be registered to a licence plate so you would have to bring that car or else you could be subject to a fine,” Director Wills said.
Mayor Cleveland confirmed that should the motion pass it would go into effect since the rules of order were suspended and it wouldn't be forwarded to the April 24 meeting. Beatty asked staff if the non-resident waterfront seasonal pass could be ready for Victoria Day.
“That would be our goal, to have it rolled out by the long weekend in May,” Director Wills said.
“Wonderful, so onboarding to the existing platform and necessary communication will be forthcoming,” Beatty said.
The motion passed.
In an interview following the meeting, Mayor Cleveland said all members of council have been hearing about the lack of a non-resident pass and Councillor Bureau wanted to see some progress made on that front.
“What I've been doing as mayor is really try to work with my councillors and learn what is their passion, what's their reason for being on council and part of that is really listening to the councillors and when I listened it was very clear this is something that meant a lot to Councillor Bureau so I just moved it up in my priority list to make sure that we could address it,” Cleveland said.
“I think what you saw tonight is a functioning council, working to move in the right direction. You can see we're not being distracted by items and agenda topics that aren't in our wheelhouse. Tonight we dealt with things that are our jobs – parking, bylaws – we dealt with a variety of municipal lower-tier government issues. We debated effectively, we had disagreements that were dealt with very well on the floor, good discussion and the decisions were made. This is what good governance looks like and I'm really proud of council because this isn't a me thing, this is a council thing.”
