In conversation with all the gossip-mongers out there who specialize in small-town hogwash, perhaps the topic that comes up most often, outside of Ma-Te-Way of course, is the Renfrew Bluegrass Festival, or more particularly, the cancellation of the Bluegrass Festival once hosted by the Town of Renfrew.
This festival, and its cancellation, appears to have been in the gunsights of Mayor Tom Sidney from the get-go after his election as mayor in the 2022 municipal elections.
Landslide Tom — he won by 13 votes — apparently told his newly assembled Council that the Renfrew Bluegrass Festival was no longer going to be a thing, and that he was going to be putting the boots to what a lot of other people seem to think was a wildly successful venture.
Kelly Latendresse has tendered a document as part of Tuesday night’s meeting agenda, one where she shares with us her exhaustive review of the town’s customer service policy, a rather generous term to apply to the rather arbitrary nature by which town employees and many elected officials give the public the municipal stiff arm when anyone has the temerity to ask a question.
Finally, at least, thanks to Latendresse, we have a desk identified as the one where the buck stops, and that would be the one occupied by CAO Gloria Raybone. Before this, everyone just sort of looked at everyone else when asked who it was that made the final call on these things. At least now, we have an identifiable in-office postal code.
For a while there, it was tough to figure who exactly Ms. Latendresse was in terms of title and responsibility. I know that she’s a member of Renfrew’s senior administrative staff, that much is clear. But every time I see her, she’s wearing a different hat. And sitting in a different chair.
If this was baseball, and these were the Blue Jays, she’d be the ultimate utility infielder and positional generalist. Can’t hit worth a lick, but a great glove.
A betting line could be opened up for tonight’s meeting to see which of the many possible hats she’ll be wearing this evening.
News arrived this morning that Chocolate maker Hershey will be discontinuing the venerable Cherry Blossom candy from its lineup.
This is like Santa Clause retiring.
I haven’t had one of these things in a long while, a good long while, but I can still remember the sheer luxury of flavour associated with this confection.
Packaged in its iconic yellow box, the Cherry Blossom was the top branch of the candy tree, as it featured the kind of chocolate you’d find on a really good Easter Bunny and combined it with a Maraschino cherry to deliver a gooey, syrupy, explosion of, well, chocolate and cherry.
This was the apex predator of chocolate treats. A person would have one, and only one of these before requiring an angioplasty. Even as kids, we showed an appropriate level pf respect for what it could do to you, and like I said, we were kids, who had no problem stuffing ourselves with candy until we puked. Yet we respected the Cherry Bomb.
For the record, the sign is announcing an impending Beach Party.
When you’re walking down a sidewalk fighting off a windchill of -25°, just about anything associated with the concept of warmth sounds like a good deal.
As Canadian as I am, and as durable a soul as I like to think that I am, the idea of beach sand and waves lapping along the shoreline does the heart a kindness. The cruelty comes with the knowledge that I’m apparently the only person in all of Canada who doesn’t take a winter vacation of some sort down south.
I guess somebody’s got to stay back and keep those driveways cleared, the fires burning, the economy pumping along. So, if you were ever wondering, that’s me. I do all of that. While you go south.
This past week has been plenty cold, so the sign was a beacon straight into my heart. A Beach Party, right here in Renfrewtown, at the Armouries. A place for me to go if the Canadian winter gets to weigh on me a little too much for my liking. But my thinking is, who else will be there if the rest of you are all off in Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and all those other places in the Caribbean, South Pacific, and along the Mediterranean? Like, who’s left?
It doesn’t really matter, I guess, so long as they have a pavilion where you can sit in a lawn chair and have one of those machine-gun sprinklers pound away at you. Now that I don’t smoke anymore, that sounds like it would be fun. It was a bitch when you were trying to enjoy a dart with the experience.
A bit of frisbee toss would be nice, I guess, although I’m roughly forty years removed from my last frisbee toss, which may well be the makings of a night at RVH. Perhaps I’ll leave the frisbee for the young ones.
I don’t drink anymore. How in the hell am I supposed to enjoy all of this without drinking? I mean, c’mon! Do I just sit there with a fake smile and a little cup with an umbrella sticking out of it, and maybe a little straw? That’s not the beach I remember.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m absolutely grateful this event is planned. And I’ll bet it’s a real winner, no reason to think otherwise.
Colourful attire, calypso music, the Beach Boys here and there, maybe even some of that old Dick Clark style dancing on the beach action, where I feel I’d really shine. I’ll bet it’ll be a lot of fun.
I guess for me, though, it might be necessary to not draw on my past beach experiences and attempt to translate them to this beach experience. I do, however, need to keep in mind that it’s the beach and the people that are the two critical elements. All the rest of it is decoration.
In four years, the deal a local radio station signed with an apparently unauthorized and unsupervised member of Renfrew Town staff will come under review, with the town having the opportunity to back out of the deal.
It’s my opinion the town should do just that.
I won’t get into the ins and outs of it, but that radio station should not have their name on that building, Ma-Te-Way, nor should they be allowed to refer to it as they currently do, like it’s theirs. Because it’s not.
This will become an issue in the next municipal election, whether the status-quo types like that or not. The sun shines for us as it shines for them, and I’d like to see God’s will and testament where he bequeathed all of that to any fast-one artists who think they run the place. You may read into that the possibility of town elites, town staff, or town politicians. Those running outside their lanes need to be shown their lanes, or disqualified from the event altogether.
Honestly, they’re just people, no different from you and I.
If all goes right, they wake up in the morning blessed with a new day. Some get the kids ready before hustling them off to wherever it is the kids go for the day. Some take out the trash before heading to work, because it’s, well, Tuesday. Some get up earlier because that new hair straightener from Amazon was on the step yesterday when they got home. A few wake up crusty, regretting those last few drinks that had them crawling into bed mere hours before and now crawling out of bed looking for the Tylenol.
It’s all pretty normal stuff, the kind of life tapestry that’s unfolding all around as others do the same things more or less, except for the night shift folks, who I won’t talk about because they wreck my narrative.
People, getting a start to their day, one foot after the next, inexorably leading to wherever it is they themselves go for the day. Almost an old-school Norman Rockwell feel to it.
Some work for others, some work for themselves. Some are part of the workforce, some provide jobs for that workforce. Some have their own businesses, some own their own businesses with storefronts along the downtown corridor. Some work for the public sector, most for the private. And every single one of them, a lot of them anyway, are salt of the earth types, the people you see at Walmart or No Frills or Timmies, or the rink on a Saturday morning. Their kids mix with yours, they mix with you, and it’s all a beautiful tableau of everyday life here in The Valley.
What could possibly upset all this, and transform these very same people into something less than a beautiful slice of everyday life?
Giving them a faint sniff of something they mistake for power. That’ll do it almost every time.
One agenda item for Tuesday evening’s Renfrew Town Council Meeting is the formal introduction of the town’s Master Transportation Plan, a roadmap into the future development of Renfrew’s transportation network as the town grows over the next twenty to thirty years.
Organized around short, medium, and long-term time frames, the plan includes a series of maps/diagrams that display some of the transportation options being looked at. Those maps and diagrams are provided below in the gallery, while the presentation documents are located in full at the bottom of the page.
It’s not my intention here to re-write an already well-written document. BT Engineering, the engineering consultancy group preparing the document, has done a really good job of explaining the underpinning rationale behind their ideas, their scientific methodology, and taking into account the wide array of factors that need to be considered before moving forward with projects that are inextricably linked, as the short term transitions to the medium term, then the medium to the long.
I remember when I was a kid how I’d spend time with pencil and paper and sketch out my development plans for our family home and property should we ever strike it rich by finding oil in the backyard. I guess it was all part and parcel of being an introvert, and therefore a loner. And I guess it passed the time on those summer holidays of my youth.
So when Eric Withers, Renfrew’s Director of Development and Environment/Town Planner/Deputy-CAO — a truly acronym defying title — opens his microphone to reveal planning progress involving development of town lands, my interest in a town council meeting literally sky-rockets. It’s worth the price of the ticket right there. If they let you in.
Director Withers shared with council plans for the development of an area of town referred to as Renfrew East, a quadrilateral parcel of lands bordered by O’Brien Road to the northwest, Gillan Road to the southwest, the town boundary to the southeast, and Highway 17 to the northeast. So, basically, from a person-on-the-street perspective, go to the Walmart/No Frills corridor along O’Brien Road, and sort of look the other way, across the street, at the lands on the other side. Or maybe even better, take a walk down the Algonquin Trail, which runs right through the centre of the proposed development. These two descriptions are not completely adequate or accurate, but it’s enough to give one a general idea.
Not that long ago, the downtown strip along Raglan Street in Renfrew was as bleak as perhaps bleak could get.
Multiple storefronts not just empty, but abandoned for all intents and purposes. Broken glass and boarded-up windows was a key take-away for anyone travelling along the Highway 60-Highway 132 corridor, not a very compelling place for anyone to stop and venture a stroll along the main drag.
I’m happy to say that, at least to me, there is more than enough evidence that the people occupying space downtown are taking it a lot more seriously than perhaps they once did. And by that I mean absentee building owners. To be absolutely clear, there have always been businesses along Raglan that have put their best foot forward to the public. It’s just that now they’re being joined by an assortment of others, owners, tenants, or both.
I wanted to take a moment to briefly comment on Renfrew’s media landscape.
A moment is all I’ll need since Renfrew has no media landscape.
The newspaper that once was, the Renfrew Mercury, is gone, initially taken over by Metroland then chopped from the roster of their media holdings. The once/week advertising rag they published also hit the dust, meaning that people lining the bottom of their litter boxes no longer had access to these two august publications.
There is still a sniff of them online, that being the notable Inside Ottawa Valley, which is absolutely awesome if you want to know what’s going down in Smiths Falls, or rather, if you want to know what happened in Smiths Falls two weeks ago.
And then there’s the radio station masquerading as a platform for legitimate journalism, with their blink-of-an-eye coverage of anything and nothing at the same time, but every hour on the hour, so that we don’t have to hold our breath long before being disappointed by the dearth of coverage this place provides.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 