The Grey County administration building in Owen Sound. (file photo)
Grey County could be establishing a new ad hoc committee to look closer at shared services opportunities between its member municipalities.
County council passed a motion during Thursday’s committee of the whole meeting to direct staff to produce a report containing terms of reference for establishing a Joint Municipal Services Ad Hoc Committee to “look at shared approaches to address challenges that municipalities in Grey County encounter.”
Owen Sound Mayor and Grey County Coun. Ian Boddy introduced the motion, saying he envisions the committee could help identify different areas “we could work on we’re all doing individually, that we could do together.”
“Often we will get together socially and say there’s something we should work on, or we could work on this and it (withers away). I know in the past there’s been libraries looked at. We’ve looked at waste management and it got stalled because we were waiting for a grant,” Boddy says. “I’m sure there’s other things there that we could look at how we share, how we do it better together.”
“I don’t want to throw out too many ideas now because I want the ideas to come from everybody to be looked at,” Boddy adds.
Boddy says he foresees the committee looking at a list of things and coming back to council, or reaching out to all of Grey County’s lower tier municipalities to pull together potential areas for collaboration.
Last year, Grey County member municipalities met to discuss the pursuit of a more centralized planning model. But not every municipality ended up being on board with the idea. In November 2024, county council directed staff to continue looking into centralizing planning services in Grey County, but shifted the focus to exploring a “hybrid model” where the county would provide planning services to some member municipalities, while others continue with the status quo.
Owen Sound has been working on its own recently on different shared service agreements with its municipal neighbours. Last year, Georgian Bluffs was left without a full-time Chief Building Official and the city and township struck a deal to have Owen Sound’s building department provide support to fill that void.
Two years ago, the city reached agreements with Meaford and Georgian Bluffs for access to its leaf and yard waste compost site.
