Gérard “Gerry” Miner may be the longest serving member of Champlain Township council and he wants to continue helping look after the municipality and its people.

“I thoroughly enjoy being a councillor,” said Miner, during a phone interview.

Miner has spent almost three full decades representing the interests of residents in the West Hawkesbury area of Champlain Township. He began his career in municipal politics starting with a three-year term from 1991 to 1994 as a member of West Hawkesbury Township council, before it was later amalgamated by the provincial government into what is now Champlain Township.

After his initial term on West Hawkesbury council, Miner ran for the township’s mayoral seat in 1994. The final ballot in that election campaign saw Miner lose by two votes. An automatic recount of the ballots resulted in a tie vote between the two candidates.

Ontario municipal election regulations allowed tie-breaker decisions by any simple means. The names of the two candidates were put in a box for a “lot draw” and Miner’s name wasn’t the one drawn.

Miner jokes that he “lost on a coin toss” and went on to focus on his career in Hawkesbury’s automotive business sector until 2003 when he decided to return to municipal politics and won his 2003 election bid to become one of the two Ward 4/West Hawkesbury representatives on Champlain Township council.

“I was born and raised here (West Hawkesbury),” said Miner. “I was a school trustee for eight years before I ran for council.”

Now semi-retired, Miner remains involved with the school district, working in the school transportation service for students. It ties in well with his desire to serve the community where he lives.

“The one thing that I have enjoyed working for the municipality,” he said, “is that we have, and always have had, a council with very little conflict. We cooperate so that we can come to right decision.”

Miner lists three primary concerns for him as part of his reelection campaign: maintaining local services, the proposed ALTO high-speed rail project, and local traffic safety.

“The biggest challenge there is (for council),” said Miner, “is to maintain the services we have without hiking the taxes too much. That is one thing I want to keep looking at.”

He also would like residents to better understand that all the money they pay in property taxes each year does not go to the municipality. The property tax bill includes all the property taxes that a landowner owes to the municipality, every school district that operates within a municipality, the senior level governments, and various agencies like the South Nation Conservation Authority that is allowed to levy property taxes as part of their annual budget revenue.

Municipal governments are responsible for collecting all property taxes and then forward the appropriate shares of those taxes to the school districts, senior governments, and other agencies. Miner noted that Champlain Township’s share of all the property taxes it has to collect is about 54 per cent. The rest of the money goes to other government agencies.

ALTO is a concern for Miner because his West Hawkesbury ward has both a large number of farmland areas at one end and more residential type neighbourhoods at the other end.

He worries that landowners in the part of the ward between Highway 417 and Paddy Road could be affected if the final decision on the ALTO route goes through or near that area. But he thinks that the high-speed rail project is an issue of concern for all of Ward 4.

“Everybody should be worried,” he said, “because we’re all going to have to pay for that (project).”

Miner noted that the final cost for construction of the proposed ALTO rail link from Toronto to Quebec City is an expense that Ward 4 residents and all Canadians will share through their property taxes as part of future federal budget payments on the national debt.

“Everybody should realize that ALTO is not needed and we are all going to pay,” said Miner.

Traffic safety is the last major concern for Miner and he indicated that the next council will need to focus more effort both on police enforcement of traffic rules against speeding and ways to make drivers slow down and be more careful.

“I’ve had a lot of complaints from people that their little country road is being used as a speed track,” he said, adding that he also has witnessed one illegal “drag race” on a neighbourhood road during his door-to-door campaigning in Ward 4.