My biggest concern is that…

My biggest concern is that there is no CA for the Muskoka watershed. We have had serious issues with flooding, poor planning on the construction of new homes/cottages in flood plans, and an accelerated degradation of the water quality in our region. We do not have the expertise or the organisation to deal with flooding and poor surface water management. Please include a new CA that deals with the Muskoka watershed.

Are you trying to reduce resources- i.e. staff and consolidate expertise. How many staff will lose their jobs?

The geographical areas of these new seven CAs are too large; unmanageable in my mind. If you are planning to house the CA in a single office, how will that help with hands-on availability of staff and the development of site specific knowledge? The smaller CAs mean that staff become more intimately knowledgeable about the areas under their jurisdiction. Their offices would be located so they would have faster response time. Imagine for a moment if there has been a breach in a berm, and cow manure is cascading into an environmentally sensitive waterways. How long would it take for a central office to respond? I think sometimes in an effort to improve efficiency, we actually reduce the ability for an organisation to respond with speed and integrity. I think that this proposal combined with the provincial mandate that employees must report to the office, may result in a dysfunctional system. I worked in an industry, where we had a head office where the "experts" were located, and the people working in the field were actually working in the field. With computer networks, the experts could in fact be well connected with the field staff. It boggles my mind that it appears that this clustering is not already happening with respect to the sharing of expertise. As far as different solutions for different areas, to me, that is not a serious issue. Our province is so geographically and economically diverse that it does not make sense that the same solution would be used throughout.