Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting of the corporate service committee to order. Grimby is situated on treaty land. This land is situated is steeped in the rich history of the first nations such as the Haranarant Aronachani and Anana Shabi including Missaga of the first first credit. There are many first nations mateies and Inuit people from across turtle island that live and work in Niagara today. The regional municipal of Niagara and Grimby stands with all indigenous people past and present in promoting the wise stewardship of the lands in which we live. Any disclosures of pecunary or noncunary interests? Seeing none. Could I get an approval of the agenda? Council Vardy, Mayor Jordan, I guess we have too many choices. Uh, okay. Uh, I'd like to get a mover and a seconder for to receive the previous minutes. Mayor Jordan, Councelor Vardy, resolve that the following minutes be received. Grimby Downtown BIA February the 11th, 2026, corporate services committee of March 9th, 2026 and the joint accessibility advisory committee of March 12, 2026. All in favor? Carried. There are no delegations, no consent reports. Can I have a mover and seconder to get the 2025 fire department accomplishments report on the floor for discussion? Councelor Vardy and Mayor Jordan, Chief K, just straight to you. Off you go. Well, thank you very much uh Mr. chair and uh committee members for allowing me this opportunity to finally get the 2025 um year in accomplishments or the retrospective as I've called it uh in front of you. Uh and I realize uh it is a lengthy report and I'll try to keep my comments um to a minimum. So good afternoon. Uh the 2025 performance of the Grimsby Fire Department reflects a busy, highly trained and community focused emergency service operating under a paid on call model. We continue to deliver fire protection and all perils response, medical response support, fire prevention, and public education, all in support of our growing and evolving community. In 2025, the department responded to 702 emergency calls, a slight increase from the previous year. That resulted in over 1,700 emergency vehicle responses to these same calls. The majority of the calls were medical assistance approximately 25%, motor vehicle collisions which represented 24%, alarm activations approximately 20% and other fire rescue and hazmat responses which total at about 23%. While structure and vehicle fires represent only 7% of the calls combined, they remain the highest risk and most resource inensive incidents. One of the things divulged through this uh report is that call demand is not evenly distributed. We see peaks during summer and fall months, late afternoon hours. This creates for us targeted pressures on staffing and response capacity. the the excuse me, the department operates with a 56 member paid on call roster when at full complement. And to maintain readiness, each firefighter completes on top of the responses approximately 120 hours of training annually. This includes fire suppression, medical response, vehicle extrication, hazardous materials at the awareness or basic level, technical rescue specifically around water, ice, and rope rescue that we perform in Grimby. This ensures strong operational readiness despite a volunteer-based model. In 2025, council made significant investments in fleet equipment modernization. We replaced the ladder truck, pumper truck, pumper rescue, which is a combination of two vehicles that will help reduce our future uh budget uh issues, and a specialized support vehicle. We're also completing a full replacement of personal protective equipment, bunker gear, spare PPE for our firefighters to have clean, dry clothing to put on after an incident, and rescue tools and hoses as per their life cycle requirements. These investments are critical to firefighter safety, reliability, and effective emergency response. As you know, fire prevention remains a core part of our service. In 2025, we delivered 50 plus educational events, reaching over 45,500 residents, 148 fire safety inspections despite staffing challenges caused by retirement, sickness, and resignations. These efforts reduced risk, improved awareness, and strengthened our community safety. It's also worth noting out that one of the most important findings of this report is emergency demand is highly concentrated by time, season, and location. This simply means that peak periods placed increased strain on staffing. The single station model has limited redundancy and simultaneous calls create operational pressures. While performance remains functional, the system requires careful planning to maintain reliability. Towards the end of 2025, we focused on transitioning towards a standalone fire department model, which has proven to be labor intensive. Planning is underway to ensure service continuity, operational stability, long-term sustainability of our volunteer system by restructuring our organizational chart. And if I can summarize, the 2025 GFD staffing model is functioning at its capacity both operationally and administratively. highly trained due to the efforts and the facility at the G the Grimsby Regional Training Center provides ample opportunity for us to train and be well prepared. The staffing model is also well equipped due to council's strategic investments and our staff are highly committed and dedicated and this is also due in part to the human resource involvement helping us with recruitment efforts, officer development, coaching and mentoring strategies. But we are operating in an environment where demand is increasing, pressure is concentrated, structural limitations exist with our cur current staffing model, changing de demographics, public expectations, and increasing life safety risk due to the intensification of the new development. So to move and focus going forward, we must continue to adapt to maintain service levels and response reliability, pardon me, as the community grows, carefully measuring our performance while assessing the everchanging risk of our community, which continues to grow one building, one neighborhood at a time. Thank you for this opportunity, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Uh, thank you, Chief. Uh, any questions from the committee? I'm sure there's a lot. Councelor Vardy, thank you for that great report. Um, how much use does uh, station 2 get? As a facility, the uh station does house our um adjunct emergency response equipment, but its primary focus is uh the training, and we utilize it extensively for our firefighter training. One of the issues in the past has been a lack of focus on the educational component or the regional training side of things. In January, we hired a chief fire prevention officer whose sole focus uh is not just prevention and public education, but also the training requirements of the regional training center. And I'm happy to report that we have restored our relationship with the province and the Ontario Fire College and are almost working at a full roster with the college to restore the programming that worked on the other side of the U training complex so to speak. Um, but the jewel of that facility is its ability for uh the firefighters to train uh and not lose our firefighters as they have to leave the uh town to go to other facilities. Uh I I'd also like to mention that the uh facility is strongly utilized by the town. Uh public works and other departments use those uh office space, pardon me, the classroom space uh for training. Um and so uh the utilization of that facility I think is um been restored to uh some of its glory days back in 2017 when it opened. >> Um are we getting much sort of outside uh use of the facility that that can help um bring in some revenue >> uh through you Mr. Chair? Thank you for the question and certainly um in addition to the Ontario Fire College, we have a number of new um customers so to speak that are using that facility. One is a regional um entity that works with police, fire, EMS and regional planning uh with robotics and drone uh training. And so Grimby's regional training center is one of three in Canada uh that has been recognized as a drone training facility. All of which um is a paying um uh c customer so to speak. So we have um you know restored some of the the funding if you like. Uh and of course it is cost recovery. it is never going to be fully funding uh the facility, but um short answer is yes, we have. >> And my next question, you say 25% of your calls are traffic accidents. Um are they mostly on the QEW that you're responding to or are they locally? Cuz I think if I'm am I right in thinking that if it's on the QEW, we get to um charge back the province. >> Thank you, Mr. chairman. Uh that's correct. The QEDW does account for the majority of our motor vehicle collisions. Um and I would say close to 75% of them are there and they do generate revenue. The provincial highway uh the province, the Ministry of Transportation to be exact, does pay the municipality uh per fire apparatus that is on uh that responds on the highway within the Grimby jurisdiction. Uh, and so it does fund us um I believe close to $40,000 a year in revenue. >> Thank you, >> Mayor Jordan. Thank you through your chair to the chief. I just want to say um great report and uh and I'm just I'm I'm always been and always will be proud of our Ginsby Fire Department and um and the volunteers that make it up and and the community to make it up and the culture quite frankly and and I think we've opened up um a new chapter now u where we can build that culture again and um and build it as as a Ginsby focused culture And I think it's going to be better for everyone involved, including including the community. And um I'm glad that MTO is is catching up and actually paying for incidents uh cuz we all know MTO can work exceedingly slow. And uh the fact that we're getting revenue back uh does make me happy. and uh the fact that we're utilizing um station 2 to uh uh the potential that it it's always been and um that's something that we can get back to 2017 levels and and and really make it a jewel in the community just both for our firefighters and for uh people across Ontario. So just kudos. Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I agree wholeheartedly. >> I certainly did all that. Uh chief, I was just curious. Um are we have are we at full compliment now for for our firefighters? >> Um we are on uh paper, but I would say that we are not. Uh we do have >> well we have some sickness uh and we have um some leaves of absence due to personal reasons. Uh so we're probably down um at least 13 uh positions out of our 56. Uh we are going to be holding a recruitment um this fall through the gracious uh assistance of human resources so that we can staff back up uh approximately 10 more firefighters. So we will be actively recruiting this fall. So we have about 37 uh core committed folks that are holding this together and um so we are short of free folks. So, does does the the fact that we're I think we're one of the only fire services in the region that has volunteers as as uh the staff as volunteers. Is that right? >> Um if you're referring to um the town staff who are also volunteering. Uh I believe um there are some other models that are out there. Um, but certainly Grimby has the most uh the largest contingent of uh full-time town staff who also volunteer. Um, I believe that's what you're getting at. >> I'm sorry. I probably didn't explain it better. So, uh, our our firefighters that are that are full-time, are they are they volunteers or part-time? How how does that work? I mean, is are they full-time firefighters? >> Uh, they're classified as volunteer firefighters. they get to select uh when they respond and how often they respond. So they're not scheduled. Uh but they are a paid on call model. So they are um remunerated. >> And that model is working very well for us, I assume. Yeah. Uh yes, as I alluded um we're responding to approximately two to three calls a day and it is stressing the system. The kind of the rule of thumb for volunteer departments uh at least in Ontario is a call a day. Um so the fact that we have some full-time staff Monday to Friday that help augment our roster uh does certainly help us, but we are straining and we're going into the the holiday season. So, we're going to see it uh you know some reduced response um in the evenings and weekends uh due to folks not being here. So, as a town grows um I noticed that one of the stats here total calls this 2025 was 702 and in 2024 was 698. So, it's pretty much status quo. things really didn't change that much. So, you must be doing something really good because the town is growing. Uh, and that number is staying about the same. So, so that's good news, I guess. Right. Overall, >> yeah, the calls are relatively uh stable. Uh we did make a correction in 2025 um specifically around our medical calls and we worked with the region and other local uh volunteer services. Um and we reduced about 33 uh determinants as we call them types of medical calls that we respond to. Uh we wanted to respond to calls that we actually make a difference and we're going to be there in a timely manner unlike full-time departments that most often um get to the uh the patient before ambulance does in a volunteer and part-time model that we have. We are delayed and so many times we get there and our services aren't required. So we've assessed and measured those and removed those. So we've reduced the number of medical calls. I think uh we're talking uh this report about 25% of the calls are medical. Um in prior years they're closer to 40. So we've reduced our calls. Otherwise if we had kept those in there we would have been going to calls that we couldn't have made a difference and of course that stresses our system. So we made some minor adjustments. >> Councelor Vardy. >> Yeah. Um, can you tell me how much on call pay is and how it works? >> There are different uh categories of um pay depending on your uh rank and your tenure. And so uh first class uh firefighter could make approximately $30 an hour. There are officer or supervisor ranks that make uh a little bit more than that. It's by a percentage. Um, and so they're paid for, um, training, um, the special events they attend, anything related to the fire service specifically, uh, and for each call, of course. And so, u, a minimum of 1 hour response. Most of our, uh, calls, uh, exceed that. So, um, their time is compensated. So on call, you're not paying someone to be ready to take a call. It's only when they actually get called up. >> That's correct. So they they respond from their homes uh in order to um depending on the type of call. Uh I alluded to the fact that 702 emergency calls resulted in 1,700 plus vehicle movements. Some calls require one or two vehicles to respond uh at a time. And so um in order to get staffing on a truck, we'll have to page out 56 volunteers. Uh in this case, we have 37 active, but to see who will respond to the calls, and we don't know who they are uh and where they're responding from. >> Well, Chief, thank you for the report. I got to say once again that I I have I have to commend your group, your team. Uh and I've finally we got you to be the chief. That was a that was an accomplishment this year for us, too. So So welcome to that. And um you want another question. I'm going to take advantage of it. >> Uh how's morale? >> Um through you, Mr. Chair. Well, morale is a hard thing uh to measure. Um when uh I would suggest to you that I from from the time that I've been here which is approximately 4 years I have seen uh an improvement in the morale and I can say that with some confidence uh because our attendance for emergency calls uh the volunteers are expected to respond to about 25% of the calls they're paged to and many through um life's challenges are not able to do that. Uh but since uh January uh so certainly in 2026 we've um we're exceeding those recommendations or those requirements and so um that in itself um is a pretty good indicator that although you know they're not going to come and tell me exactly how things are going. They may tell you but they won't tell me. I do have an open door policy, but um I I think their performance is indicating that um the standalone is probably fire department is probably help some of that, but they've um they've recommitted. So the 37 are performing like the 56. >> Thank you very much. >> Once again, thank you very much. Great report. lots of luck for the future and um again thanks for by the way what I would like to say is that you know over the last this term uh because of what was going on administratively in the background with with the consolidation of services and so on so forth we weren't getting as many reports that we would like to have seen because we used to get them pretty frequently before that before all that happened so hopefully we'll get back to that in the next term where we see the reports maybe quarterly or whatever the case might be but anyways again thank you very much great job thanks chief Uh resolve that report FCR26-01 2025 fire department accomplishments dated May 11, 2026 be received. All in favor? And that's carried. Next move the correspondence can have a mover and second to get the staff memo on bill 97 on MFIPA amendments on the floor for discussion. What does that mean? >> MFYPA. Go ahead. >> Um, you just need your second. >> Oh, sorry. I mean, it's MBA municipal. >> Okay. All right. Okay. Got it. Okay. I understand. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Um, a move in a second. Jordan. Okay. Tori, it's yours. Okay. So through the chair, there's been a few updates uh through bill 97. So the municipal freedom of information and protection of privacy act um through bill 97 at the province which is the plan to protect Ontario um received royal resent uh royal ascent on uh April 24th. So there's a few changes that we just wanted to make you aware of. Um, some of them come into uh force in effect July 1st, 2026 and the remainder come into effect January 1st, 2027. The main ones, there's a chart there that summarizes um the changes, but the big one is that for FOI response times, it's been changed from 30 calendar days to 45 business days to respond. And so that allows staff additional time uh especially for complex ones. Again, that is a maximum. So if we're able to produce it sooner, then we we can they also allow for phased requests. So we we've noticed a big um trend into uh longer, more complex uh FOI requests. We think this is partially due to AI uh people using it to form their requests. And so um it may take us a lot longer because these these requests are coming in with a lot of details and a lot of questions. And so now if we need to ask for it, we can do a phase request. So we'll do, you know, we have to lay it out. We have to provide them in advance, but we can do some of the records, the easier ones, um, first and then give ourselves a couple more, uh, you know, days or weeks to provide the ones that might take a longer amount of time. Um, the other big change in here is for um, privacy impact assessments or PAS. Uh so all software that collects personal information now needs to have a PIA and this change will be um required January 1st of 2027. This is a pretty big undertaking. We're currently doing an assessment to really understand how much software we have that um could have personal information. In the past it was um up to the municipality to create these and now it's being mandated that we do it. So, we do have to backtrack and do some additional work for that. Um, it's largely an administrative item, but just for your awareness, the privacy commissioner at the province can come in and ask the town at any time for a PIA, and we have to be able to provide that uh as of January 1st. And it's specifically to ensure that if there is a privacy breach at any level uh that we know what software is being impacted, what type of personal information has been collected and how we can safeguard it or or try to protect that information. Uh there's a little bit in there about privacy breaches and just uh making sure we have documented processes about what we're going to do. Uh we can also uh there now is a privacy complaint uh protocol that helps if we have had a privacy complaint uh we do need to notify and in the past that um tended to be a little bit more discretionary with no formal standards. Uh there's also a piece in here about cyber security records. So, uh, MIFIPA no longer applies to, um, any cyber security records that MUI may have on file. And so, uh, just in conclusion of this report, uh, it does mean that we do need to redeploy some of our what current projects so that our, um, specifically privacy uh, sorry, records privacy and access coordinator and some of our IT staff can focus their attention on this because we do have to have it ready for January 1st. uh that those are the biggest changes that will need to take place. Um but overall it's it's you know it's a good initiative that just helps protect um privacy so we can appreciate the changes. Uh but we will we will be revising some work plans to make sure that we can meet all these deadlines. Uh Philip, I didn't know if you had anything else. Did you want to add anything? I just know it touches your team as well. >> Maybe a comment comment Mr. Chair. Um yes. So, we've looked out through the uh legislation and um Tori's point about we're going to have to go a bit sideways here with our staff that we're on a work plan. Going to have to rep prioritize our work plan. It is a significant undertaking. We have uh over 85 different softwares to assess whether they contain priv 85 over 85 different applications whether they contain uh private data or not. Um and if they do, they have to go through this assessment. I would want to also mention to the committee that um as of Friday, this past Friday, um I had launched signed a contract for a cyber security audit, an independent audit. It's not the town's assessment. It's going to be a consultant called Digital Boundary Group. Uh they're famous for doing these audits over the last probably two decades. Um so they're going to have a complete assessment of our security. It's related to privacy. >> Now we'll open the floor for comments or council. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, can, and maybe this is to Tori and and to Phillip. Um, can we use AI to help us in any of this? >> Yeah. Uh, so we currently have a platform that we use to track all of our FOIs and uh called Veil. They also have a um a PIA module as well that we've employed and they actually are building AI into that. So there's an initial questionnaire that it would it generates the questions for us and then um the actual expert so um both in records and in IT and then maybe someone in public works or whoever the end user is would go through this questionnaire answer the questions and then we would determine if there's a next step if we need to complete a full PIA or if there's no risk to us. So um the software that we're using to track it is already well well involved in that. So it it is working um from from the limited ones we've done so far. Yeah. >> Mayor Jordan. >> Thank you uh through the chair to uh Tori. Uh so it's another provincial download like even though it may some part of it may be good. Are they giving us any compensation for doing it >> through the chair? Yes, I'd agree it's a provincial download. No, there's no compensation. And in addition, one of the big things that um clerks and AMCTO and AML had been advocating for was uh an increase in the fees. Currently, it's $7.50 50 cents that we can charge back to the person that's requesting the FOI per 15 minutes uh as long as it's not their own records. And there's a c there's a long list of exemptions and limitations to that. Uh so $7.50 for 15 minutes of searching for records is not uh great. So uh they did not make a change to that dollar figure. Well, um just to further on that chair, um speaking of history in 2010, uh accessing uh freedom of information, that was the same hourly rate as 2010. So 16 years later, um we're collecting the the same dollar value and uh one would hazard a guess that uh everything's gone up since then. Uh, I think we can see that and it's yet another provincial government download with um getting uh municipalities to do more with the same amount of money. Uh, and it puts it on the backs of the taxpayers and and uh the taxpayers of Grimby um, in my opinion have had enough. Um, provincial downloading with u no compensation is is just what it is. It's it's downloading from the province. The province does less and less and um we pay for more and more. So, >> you beat me to the punch. That was what I was going to say, but anyways. Well, well said. Uh councelor Vy >> uh Tori. Um does the province set how much you can charge for this service >> through the chair? Yes. For FOI requests, they do. It's in it's in their legislation. So, it's $7.50 50 cents uh per 15 minutes and it's $5 to submit the request. >> So they haven't changed then in years and years and years. So our clerk's um lobbying or putting that forward that it needs to increase >> through the chair. The one I'm familiar with is AMTTO and yes that's definitely been a big piece of advocacy over many many years but uh unfortunately we didn't see that change this time around. So Tori, uh, if I might, um, can you give me some give us some idea about the cost, typical cost, high-end, low end of performing one of those one of those re those searches? I mean, you said $7.50 for first 15 minutes and that's it. After that, there must be that's just the tip of the iceberg, right? >> So $7 in terms of resources and cost and so on and so forth. >> Yeah. $7.50 per 15 minutes general. Yes. Not not in not first. So if it takes >> that's more than a minimum wage. >> If it takes a staff member um an an hour to do a record search, we would then charge that back. We don't charge for under $25. If it's under $25, we don't charge the resident. And if it's over $100, we can ask for a deposit. >> What if it goes beyond that? We do we swallow so we swallow most of the cost. >> The municipality >> there there's a long list of exemptions. uh we can charge the resident. So if our cost estimate expects it to be 15 hours, we can charge that to them. It's up to them to pay. So we have had there there are situations that work well where we say it's going to cost $400. We do the record search, they come in and pay. There's also examples that uh somebody submits a a request, we run it, we give them a cost estimate, they don't want the records anymore. That's an example where we would eat those costs. Um, also there's a long list of exemptions of what can't be charged. So, someone searching searching for someone's own records. Um, I'm trying to other task that the records uh and privacy um coordinator does. There's a long list that we don't get charged. So, yes, there is a a lot of staff time that goes into FOI requests that we are not recouping. >> And you can't do one of those on yourself. >> Oh, yeah. >> That's what I heard. All right. Any other questions, mayor? No. Thank you, Tori. Uh, resolve that the memorandum regarding Bill 97 for Municipal Freedom of Information and Privacy Act amendments be received. All in favor? That's carried. Under other business, uh, we're going to look to Katie for the end of term presentation. Katie, you're getting really good at this. >> No, thank you through your chair. I'm sure um everyone's really sick of us um saying this spiel over and over, but given that the corporate services committee is just meeting now um since um April, the the committee is going to be providing a brief end ofterm report for council. Um this will note the committee's accomplishments and future opportunities from this term. Um it will be compiled by staff and we'll dedicate time at the June 15th meeting to review the accomplishments and future opportunities um for finalization. Councelor Frank as the committee chair will present this during the chair's report at the council meeting of July 13th. Um and the rules of course that govern chair's reports fully apply such as not exceeding 5 minutes in length. So be happy to answer any questions if you have them. Um given the corporate services committee does not consist of lay members what I would like to suggest is if you have feedback or comments on this committee if you want to email them in to clerks we're happy to assemble that. We'll give it to the chair and um we can review it at our June meeting um if we have one. Otherwise, we can do this uh we'll make sure that you use the clerk's team as um as your admin. Yeah, as your admin so that we're not uh we're not doing quorum and emails or anything, but we'll we will make sure that this gets done. Um >> I do have a few ideas, but I'll I'll direct them to Katie. Okay. All right. see no other business. Uh, next meeting is going to be on June 15th, uh, 12 p.m. in this in this room. U other than that, meetings adjourned. Thank you very much. Have a good day.