Town of Ingersoll Seeking Help for ERTH Corporation Dilemma

Thursday, 13 July 2017 at 13:49

The Town of Ingersoll is trying to figure out how they can meet with ERTH Corporation.

INGERSOLL - The Town of Ingersoll has run into some problems with their utility holder ERTH Corporation as they look to merge with another company.

Ingersoll is a shareholder with ERTH Corporation and they would need to vote on any potential merger. The problem is that in order to get all of the information, any meeting with ERTH and councillors would have to be open to the public.

ERTH is a private corporation and they would not want all of that information to be public. CAO for the Town Bill Tigert tells Heart FM they are not able to take this meeting in a closed session.

"ERTH is a company that is formed and structured under the Ontario Business Corporations Act and not all of their information is public information, unlike a municipal council. So they have a requirement in our shareholders agreement with them that we signed on with them to maintain confidentiality that would affect their market competitiveness. So when we're looking at a decision about whether or not ERTH should merge with another utility, there is a lot of sensitive information that can't be shared publicly and yet under the same time under the municipal act, municipal councils are only allowed to meet in a closed session under certain criteria. We don't see where we have that criteria for council to meet in a closed information and therefore how are we going to get the proper information to them, so that they can make an educated decision on whether to vote in favour of the merger."

Ingersoll has reached out to their closed meeting investigator if he can offer any advice on where to proceed and are hoping to get an answer by the end of the week.

"So there have been some recent decisions that have come out from the Ontario Ombudsman in 2016 about this, that we have looked at. So we are going to be asking our closed meeting investigator if he can comment and give us some advice on dealing with this issue."

Tigert says their are some amendments being proposed to the municipal act that would allow more types of closed meetings but it hasn't been put into place yet.