The City of Owen Sound will get some financial relief from the county level for the cost of securing its courthouse.
Grey County voted to create a cost sharing agreement with Owen Sound, after hearing from CAO Kim Wingrove that the provincial funding allocation was well below what was needed to break even for the cost of security and prisoner transportation.
"The program that has been in place since 2012 allocates funding based on past expenditures, but lacks responsiveness to current costs, so they're paying based on costs that were incurred up to two years ago," she told council. "The amount of provincial funding available at $125 million has been fixed since 2018."
Owen Sound will pay nearly $560,000 in security and transportation for the courthouse in 2024, and receive only $330,000 from Ontario.
As a result of that funding model, there's a shortfall of $230,000 for courthouse security and transportation that the City of Owen Sound needs to make up.
Council members acknowledge that it was unfair that Owen Sound bear that entire burden, given that the courthouse serves the entire region.
For budgeting purposes, Wingrove said it would be difficult to forecast future costs to the county through this potential agreement.
"My thinking at this point in time is that we can't know what the numbers are until the end of the year when the costs have been incurred and established," she said. "So we would be covering off the difference from the year prior rather than looking ahead, because we just wouldn't know."
Wingrove said that despite advocacy efforts at the AMO Conference, Ontario has not indicated that it will move away from the current funding model.