The strength of Conservation…

The strength of Conservation Authorities is that they are local in nature. They've done a good job of creating budgets that are a combination of municipal levy and revenue generation at a local level with community board members helping to define programming. The return on investment for many of these programs, like agricultural stewardship, water quality analysis and monitoring and environmental education has been impressive and these organizations leave a huge impact in their communities. Creating not only larger, but some massive regional CAs would clearly be at the detriment of their communities with little to no benefit and significant increases in costs and decrease in services.

Large scale amalgamation would only serve to add bureaucracy and limit to autonomy and ability of CAs to get front line work actually completed. If they need to get approvals at regionals levels that are far removed from the on the ground work or local offices (ex. a regional office in Barrie while people are trying to get work done in Bruce County) this will be at the detriment of those related programs.

Your desired improvements that are driving this proposed amalgamation could be very easily achieved through governance on those issues and funding for such through the new Conservation Agency. Create policies for permitting and planning at that level, provide funding so the CAs can do their jobs well, and apply a standard permitting platform that is available to all CAs. For those smaller CAs that are lacking in staff and resources for things like data management and IT, provide them with the tools they need. All this would come with much less disruption to service and costs and keep these agencies community driven!