North Frontenac council called its chief building official vacancy an emergency on September 11 and appointed Chris Beeg to fill the job. By the township's own date, the office had been empty since July 21. Without that word, emergency, a council on its way out had no power to appoint the official who signs your building permit.
Nominations closed August 21, and fewer than three quarters of this council will be back. When that happens, provincial law strips the outgoing council of some powers until the new one is sworn in. People call it the lame duck period. One power council loses is the power to appoint an officer, and the chief building official is an officer. The law leaves a single door open. A council can still act "in the event of an emergency." So council declared one.
Council's reasons are decent ones. The building official's office sends the inspector to your footings and your septic bed. Building here has grown busier every year since 2023, and busiest of all this summer. The work was piling up and the township needed somebody. Since July the township had been borrowing part of Central Frontenac's building official, an arrangement council's own budget describes as back-up for vacations and training. It was never meant to carry a whole vacancy, and council was right to say so.
But council put something else in writing too. It said it looked for another way and couldn't find one. Its own by-law book says otherwise. In 2022 council appointed a deputy chief building official, Dan Halladay, with the chief's enforcement powers whenever the chief was away. The occasions the by-law lists run from vacation and training to death, and a chief building official who dies leaves the chair as empty as one who resigns. That by-law has never been repealed by name. Whether Halladay was still on the books in July is a question for the township's chief administrative officer.
Council named Halladay and the incoming chief building official on the same day in April 2022, before the new chief started. It wasn't in a lame duck period. It just didn't wait.
Then there's the timing. Council met with its full powers on August 13, three weeks into the vacancy. It got through report after report that night, among them road allowances, land sales, a site plan by-law, fire grants and a tax sale. I read every page of the minutes, and the building official doesn't appear anywhere in them.
You don't hire a building official over a weekend. But the chair was empty, and in eight days the door would shut on council's power to fill it. What did council do about those eight days? If an office that sat empty through a full-powers meeting is an emergency, the lame duck rule protects a lot less than you'd think.
When council did act, on September 11, its agenda didn't hold a single report on the building department. No cost. No options. Council declared an emergency with nothing behind it.