Two years into his first term leading Orillia, Mayor Don McIsaac said he has “no regrets” about becoming the city’s mayor.
“I knew what I was signing up for because both my parents have been mayor,” McIsaac told OrilliaMatters. “It's sort of the family business, if you will.”
When asked how he feels about council’s work halfway into the term, McIsaac pointed to a long list of successful projects to council’s credit.
From finishing phase two of Laclie Street reconstruction, bringing a rapid rehousing site to West Street South, and investing over $12 million to refurbish Brian Orser Arena, among many others, McIsaac said council has added quite a few things to the “win column” over its first two years.
“We've got Terry Fox (Circle) teed (up); we've put through a short-term rental accommodation bylaw. We've done a number of things that I think are meaningful,” he said.
However, he also expressed frustration with the “glacial speed” municipal politics can sometimes have.
“It's been frustrating in some cases. For example, we put in free bus passes for students and discounts for seniors. It took one year from deciding on doing that to have that in place,” he said. “And I thought, why not the next day? Why does this take so long? There's a frustration with the slowness of how things move at glacial speed.”
Before taking office, council set four priorities for the 2022-2026 term, such as strengthening community participation and engagement, and business retention and expanding arts and culture.
Council also prioritized “helping the community with things that matter,” through physician recruitment, housing, improving roads, and more, as well as helping the city’s most vulnerable, whether facing homelessness, mental health issues, or addiction.
While action has been taken on a variety of these priorities, McIsaac said he hopes to see more done in the next two years.
“In the next two years, I'd like to see us address the doctor shortage,” he said. “One of the west coast cities has an idea where they hire physicians on municipal payroll and put them in a clinic and get them to go, and they bill (the province) and they recover funds that way. I'd like to see that in place.”
With the current rapid rehousing site aimed at youth aged 16-24, McIsaac also said he’d like to see more done to address homelessness in the city.
Although Simcoe County’s West Street North affordable housing hub has also opened since McIsaac took office, he wonders whether the homelessness situation is “better or worse than it was two years ago.”
“I'd like to see more in place for rapid rehousing, for people coming from encampments,” he said. “There's number of buildings we're looking at that have potential here in the city, that we could convert into rapid rehousing. We've talked to the county. They're supportive, so those are ideas we can put in place.”
Over the past two years, council has passed three budgets with tax increases well below the rate of inflation, coming it at 2.79 per cent, 1.73 per cent, and 2.5 per cent across its 2023-2025 budgets, even as the city saw skyrocketing budgetary pressures from external service providers like the OPP and County of Simcoe this year.
“I was actually disappointed that we only had a two and a half percent increase (this year),” he said. “I thought it could have been lower. There were things we could have done, even without touching the reserves that could have brought the tax rate down.”
During budget deliberations, McIsaac has routinely proposed measures that will lower the tax hike on residents, even as some members of council cautioned reducing the tax hit today could result in the need for much larger tax hikes to fund city projects and services down the road.
When asked about how he can keep the tax rate down without mortgaging the future, McIsaac stressed that “careful planning is important.”
Looking to the future, McIsaac said council will reevaluate certain items in the city’s 10-year capital forecast – composed of projects meant to take place in the next decade – to keep the city’s expenses in check.
As it stands, the city has a $250-million funding shortfall for the forecast, with McIsaac questioning the need for several big ticket items.
“We'll look at the 10-year plan in the first quarter of 2025. There's a $250-million shortfall there, but there's all sorts of stuff in there that I think are big question marks,” he said. “We need to be careful as we go forward here, but I look at spending the money as if it's my own.”
McIsaac said the process will be a “balancing act” between maintaining infrastructure and watching the city’s bottom line, mentioning around $50 million in projects are proposed through the Downtown Tomorrow Plan, and around $30 million is scheduled for a parking garage with the planned new downtown bus terminal, and more.
“If I have $30 million bucks, I’m not going to build a parking garage,” he said. “We need a bus turnaround, for sure, but we don’t need $30 million in parking.”
However, those are discussions for a council meeting in the future, he stressed.
Overall, McIsaac conceded council has had its “fist fights” on things, but he said the city has accomplished a fair amount of work over its first two years.
“That's what councils do. They have a fist fight and try to determine the best course of action for the city, then vote,” he said. “We move forward together, but there's a number of things that we've done.”
As council moves into the second half of its term, McIsaac said he has enjoyed his time as mayor, though he has yet to decide whether he’ll run again.
“I'm not sure at this point. I've enjoyed what I've done. I think we've got some things that we can put in the win column that we've done. We messed some stuff up, too, and we need to fix that,” he said.
“I'm going to look at it, say, three, three-and-a-half years in, and determine the progress we made.”
