THUNDER BAY — Thunder Bay will appoint a weed inspector within the bylaw enforcement department.
The weed inspector would need to be specially trained to detect noxious weeds.
The position is required by law but is currently vacant.
The Weed Control Act is a provincial act that was put in place in 1990. It facilitates the control of noxious weeds and requires municipalities to appoint area weed inspectors by by-law to enforce the act.
Commissioner Corporate Services & City Treasurer Keri Greaves said the act gives the municipalities permission to investigate and enforce the removal of noxious weeds.
“This will be fairly new to our bylaw enforcement officers. The Ministry of Agricultural Food and Agribusiness provides training opportunities for enforcement officers so that they can tell the difference between noxious weeds and non-noxious weeds. So, this will be a bit of a learning curve for the enforcement officers,” said Greaves.
Despite concerns from council members about how bylaw enforcement will conduct its investigations, city staff assures council the weed inspector will not chronically go onto private properties to ensure homeowners do not have noxious weeds.
Enforcement will be entirely complaint driven, according to city staff.
“This is not going to be very high up on our list of enforcement activities,” said City Manager John Collin.
“I just want everyone to understand, including the general public, that yes, we will take complaints and we will action those complaints in due course based on all the other priorities we have within by law enforcement,” he added.
Coun. Rajni Agarwal questioned the policy asking why train a bylaw officer rather than seeking out a horticultural expert to perform the investigation.
Greaves said the city is willing to seek out expert advice, but they would still require a bylaw officer to enforce the policy.
“Assigning others within the administration to take on these responsibilities, yes, the horticultural staff be a logical and reasonable choice, but it's a reality of balancing workloads. Our horticultural staff right now is working at full capacity, and I would feel very uncomfortable asking them to take this on as an enforcement measure and appointing them as bylaw officers… We'll leverage them for expert advice when we need it, but this fits squarely within our enforcement personnel to do,” said Collin.
Coun. Andrew Foulds asked whether city staff is planning to train every bylaw officer or a select few.
“That will be up to the bylaw municipal enforcement manager to figure out who he trains and to what capacities. That's our work to do. All we are here this evening to do is satisfy a legislative requirement to appoint a bylaw officer to deal with noxious weeds,” said Collin.
Agarwal said she was concerned that appointing a weed inspector could potentially pit neighbours against leading to more complaints for the bylaw enforcement department.
“We've had so many complaints that we've heard of the bylaw department is backlogged like for years already in their reporting,” said Agarwal.
City Clerk Krista Power stated that optimizing to mitigate the pressure on the bylaw enforcement department was not up for debate. Under provincial legislation, the city had to appoint a weed inspector.
“The Weed Control Act has been in place for a very long time. We had previously managed it through our property standards by law. The government has said no, you need to have a standalone bylaw and appoint people individually. This has already existed. This is not new. We are simply needing to have a standalone bylaw to appoint those people to do this work,” said Power.
“People could have complained about noxious weeds for numerous numbers of years. We haven't seen that. We haven't received that. Could that happen? Certainly. But it was already in play under the property standards bylaw. This is now a separate bylaw and enforcement officers to do this work.”
