In each of the four quarterly reports the County of Frontenac filed to its own Council in 2025, the number of alleged staff-to-resident abuse incidents at the County-owned Fairmount Home rose against the prior decade's baseline. Across the year the home logged fifteen such incidents in total, more than the prior decade combined on the public record. The Q4 2025 report added an alleged misappropriation-of-resident-funds category the home had not logged in any prior quarter on the public record, alongside one unaccounted tablet of a controlled substance. Council, sitting as the home's Committee of Management, received each report "for information purposes only."
The institutional setup
Fairmount Home, at 2069 Battersea Road in Glenburnie, is owned and operated by the County of Frontenac. The home's Committee of Management is County Council. There is no separate board. The same elected officials who govern the County govern its 128-bed long-term care home, and every quarterly critical-incident report the home files to that table arrives with the same recommendation line. That receiving posture is the question this story is built around. The reports the home has filed across the past four quarters describe its worst year on its own record. The body that governs the home has, on the public record, received each of them.
The escalation, in the home's own numbers
Across the sixteen quarters from Q1 2022 through Q4 2025, the home's self-reported count of alleged staff-to-resident abuse incidents by quarter runs: 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 2, 5, 6. The last four quarters are the four highest, and the prior twelve never exceeded one. Read against overall non-outbreak critical-incident totals, the four quarters of 2025 logged 11, 11, 14 and 14 incidents (Information Reports 2025-048, 2025-061, 2025-103, 2026-018, each landing in the next quarter's agenda packet). Those four totals are the highest in the comparable strict-quarter record since Q1 2022, tied or exceeded by only one earlier quarter (Q4 2023 at 11).
A note on what the numbers can and cannot carry. Three reporting regimes sit in the published record back to 2015. The 2017 Wettlaufer Public Inquiry and the 2021 Fixing Long-Term Care Act both tightened how incidents are categorised and reported, so direct decade-on-decade arithmetic is not comparable. The sixteen-quarter modern-format series above is the defensible spine. Within it, the 2025 acceleration is the most concentrated four-quarter rise in alleged staff-to-resident abuse on the home's modern-regime record.
The Q4 2025 report (Information Report 2026-018, February 18, 2026 agenda) is the report where the new misappropriation category appears. The two alleged misappropriations of resident funds are a line item the home had not logged in any prior quarter on the public record.
Every figure in this section is the home's own number, in the home's own language. The reports use "alleged" and "self-reported." That is the language this piece carries.
The regulatory record, alongside the numbers
The Ministry of Long-Term Care's record on Fairmount runs alongside the County's quarterly reports. NFNM pulled every MLTC public inspection report on the home since February 2018 and cross-walked thirteen of them against the inspection summaries the County reported to Council across the same window. Thirteen matched. The home is not telling Council something different from what the Ministry has put in the public file.
The pattern in that file is older than the 2025 escalation. In a forty-one-day window in late 2023, two back-to-back MLTC inspections produced eleven written notifications combined, the largest such burst in the home's 2018-to-2026 inspection record. The December 5, 2023 inspection issued two of those notifications under section 28(1) of the Fixing Long-Term Care Act for the home's failure to report alleged abuse and improper care to the Director. The same December inspection also cited the home for using a prohibited device that limits a resident's movement, for menu planning that did not provide a second special-diet option, and for failing to comply with its own Code White policy.
The same theme recurs in 2025. A February 11, 2025 MLTC inspection produced three written notifications, two of them for the home's failure to follow its own "Zero Tolerance for Resident Abuse" policy and after-hours reporting protocol. The home's own report on that inspection, returned to Council in May 2025, says it "will no longer rely on guidance provided by a MLTC Inspector." An August-and-September 2025 Proactive Compliance Inspection covered twelve protocols including Prevention of Abuse and Neglect, Medication Management and Staffing, and produced two written notifications for drug-storage failures (medicated creams stored in a resident's room, controlled substances not double-locked).
An October 2025 MLTC inspection produced three further written notifications, all of them for the home's failure to follow its own falls-prevention policies. Three Ministry of Labour inspections in a thirty-two-day window from December 19, 2025 to January 19, 2026, triggered in part by a home-wide adenovirus outbreak that hit sixteen residents, ordered the home to review its corporate workplace-violence policy at least annually and to keep staff drinks and cosmetics out of areas where infectious materials, hazardous chemicals or drugs are handled.
The recurrence in these inspection records is not a citation for novel non-compliance. It is a citation, repeatedly, for not following procedures the home already has on paper.
Staffing, on the record since 2022
The home's staffing situation has been on the Council record since May 2022. At the May 18, 2022 County Council meeting, Susan Brant, Administrator of Fairmount Home, delivered the monthly CAO report in then-CAO Kelly Pender's absence. She told Council the home had twenty-five open positions, including registered nurses, registered practical nurses, personal support workers, cooks and dietary aides (Frontenac News, May 25, 2022, reporting from the meeting). Susan Brant, Administrator of Fairmount Home, has signed every Fairmount Quarterly Update Activity Report on the public record since 2021. Her background before the Administrator appointment was in municipal financial management and corporate services with the County.
CAO continuity sits beside her. Kelly Pender served as CAO of the County of Frontenac from May 5, 2014 to April 30, 2024. Kevin Farrell, his internal successor and a fourteen-year County employee, has been CAO since May 1, 2024 and signs each of the Fairmount quarterly reports. Three consecutive Wardens have chaired Council across the four-quarter escalation in alleged staff-to-resident abuse: Frances Smith, Mayor of Central Frontenac, through 2024; Gerry Lichty, Mayor of North Frontenac, through 2025; Bill Saunders, Deputy Mayor of Frontenac Islands, since November 19, 2025. The escalation is not a one-Warden, one-CAO, or one-Administrator phenomenon. It happened in front of the same Council seats, under the same senior leadership, quarter after quarter.
The satisfaction survey, what investigation found
Returned to Council in the same February 18, 2026 agenda packet as the Q4 2025 critical-incident report was the home's 2025 Resident and Family Annual Satisfaction Survey (Information Report 2026-015). Sixty-seven respondents. Ninety-eight per cent overall satisfaction. The highest figure on the home's public record across the decade of survey reporting NFNM has reviewed.
The two documents arrive at Council together. That is how the investigation found the survey. The contrast was not the framing it was looking for, but it is on the public record and it bears on the same question this piece is built around: what is the body that governs the home doing with what the home is telling it?
The 67 responses cover a 128-bed home. If every respondent were a resident, the response rate is about 0.52 per bed; the instrument is delivered to residents and to the family powers of attorney who act on their behalf, so the share of resident experience captured directly is lower than that headline ratio suggests. The decade-long history of response volume is stable and low. The home reported fifteen responses in 2015, thirty-four in 2016, sixty-one in 2017, fifty-one in 2018, and sixty-seven in 2025. In 2018 the home recorded 0.40 responses per bed; the nine-home regional average that year was 0.63. The 2025 ratio of 0.52 per bed is still below that seven-year-old comparator. The overall satisfaction score has trended upward across the same period: 97 per cent in 2016, 88 in 2017, 91 in 2018, 98 in 2025.
Report 2026-015 says Fairmount is one of an eight-home long-term care cluster that developed the survey instrument together to meet the requirements of the Fixing Long-Term Care Act and CARF accreditation standards. Appendix A of the same report publishes both the resident survey and the family-and-substitute-decision-maker survey in full. Neither asks about experiencing or witnessing abuse, neglect, missing resident funds, or missing medications. The closest the resident survey comes is Q19, "Feeling safe and secure with all team members (all staff)," on which Fairmount scored 100 per cent in 2025, and Q20, "Feeling safe and secure with other residents," on which the home scored 92 per cent.
The instrument is a service-satisfaction survey covering personal care, home environment, laundry, meals, recreation, and communication. It is not an incident-detection instrument. The satisfaction survey and the quarterly Critical Incident report are asking different questions about the same home.
The capital question, named on the floor of Council
On September 17, 2025, the question of whether to replace Fairmount Home reached the Council table during Council's consideration of a $1.61 million Newterra modular wastewater system to replace the failing septic at the Fairmount and County Office complex. The Newterra system is movable. That is why the question of relocating the home came up: if the County rebuilds Fairmount somewhere else, can the new septic move with it? Then-Warden Gerry Lichty, Mayor of North Frontenac, asked the question on the floor of Council and answered it himself:
"We don't [know] what we are doing, in terms of replacing Fairmount. We might replace it in five years, it may be 25 years, or never, we just don't know."
South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal, now the County's 2026 Deputy Warden, framed the question as a thirty-year planning window, citing his township's Storrington Centre project. The estimated cost of a replacement 160-bed home, in 2024 dollars, is approximately $60 million (Frontenac News article #18270 reporting from the September 17, 2025 Council meeting). Under the long-standing County-Kingston funding arrangement, Fairmount's capital costs split 32 per cent to the County and 68 per cent to the City of Kingston. The Newterra septic itself splits on the same ratio: roughly $538,000 to the County over three years, more than $1.1 million to Kingston.
The decision paralysis Lichty named in September 2025 was not new. Sixteen months earlier, when Kevin Farrell took over as CAO on May 1, 2024, he publicly flagged the future of the aging home as one of three priorities he saw on the horizon (Frontenac News article #17270, May 8, 2024). Council did not vote on a replacement plan in September 2025. It has not voted on one since.
What comes next
The Q1 2026 Fairmount Quarterly Update Activity Report is scheduled to land in the May 20, 2026 County Council agenda packet. Under standing practice, Council will receive it for information. The 2026 Resident and Family Annual Satisfaction Survey goes out again in the fall. The same Council that has not decided what to do about the home will receive both.