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April 7, 2016 | 80 pages
Vote to amend hospital’s administrative bylaw carried Tara Gesner
tgesner@metroland.com
Is best really better? Well, it depends on who you ask. In an 8-1 recorded vote, with one trustee abstaining, the board for Carleton Place & District Memorial Hospital (CPDMH) voted March 30 to move forward with best practices in board size and composition and adopt them for its governance structure. “I hate the saying ‘best practices,’” Beckwith Reeve Richard Kidd said, presenting as a delegation. “Best practices are for certain situations.”
“If the province thought this was really important they would mandate it,” he added. Kidd and other local politicians are concerned residents are at risk of losing their community ownership of the hospital. “They say best practices, and in some places it might be,” the reeve said. “However, not here...because we are special.” As a result of last week’s vote, the CPDMH board will be reduced to 12 trustees and five ex-officio nonvoting directors: CEO, chief of staff, chief nursing executive, chief financial officer
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and medical staff president. Five ex-officio voting directors will be eliminated: Carleton Place council representative, Carleton Place industry representative, Beckwith council representative, Mississippi Mills community representative and CPDMH Auxiliary representative. According to CEO Toni Surko, CPDMH members will now vote on the proposed changes at a special meeting. “Although we have not determined a date, the meeting will be advertised for two weeks in the local newspaper,” she said. CPDMH board chair Marcel Pinon noted the five trustees to be eliminated do not have a conflict at the members meeting. “Everyone gets a vote,” he said. Not one to mince words, “What a tangled web you people weave,” LanarkFrontenac-Lennox & Addington MPP Randy Hillier said. Changes to CPDMH’s board size and composition take effect at the organization’s annual general meeting (AGM) in June. In a media release the day
after the March 30 meeting, Hillier declared: “The community represented, democratic board was last night fundamentally altered into an unaccountable cartel that will answer to no one.” He stressed the vote “creates an opaque environment that allows the board to operate without scrutiny, and it creates the potential to permit exploitation, financial impropriety and malfeasance.” Conflict of interest At the start of last Wednesday’s meeting trustees were asked by Pinon to declare any potential conflicts of interest. Mississippi Mills’ community representative Amanda Pulker and CPDMH Auxiliary representative Marg LeBlanc did so. “I find it hard to believe that none of the (other three) members have a conflict in this vote,” trustee Rob Clayton said. “The ones who are voting for their own positions.” Clayton was referring to the council representatives for Carleton Place and Beckwith, Sean Redmond
Jennifer Westendorp/METROLAND
Oh so sweet!
The second annual Lanark and District Maple Syrup Producers’ Maple Weekend took place April 2-3 across the county. Visitors were able to see local maple syrup production up close, take tours of maple bushes and taste sweet maple treats. Above, siblings Brayden, Kaylee-Ryen and Peyton Lockhart savour some tasty maple toffee at Thompsontown Maple Products near Clayton on April 3. Below, Charlie Temple, owner of Temple’s Sugar Bush, stands beside his maple syrup boiler.
See VOTE page A/CP2
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