🧑‍⚖️ The integrity commissioner cleared the mayor. The complainant says that's not how it was supposed to work.

~ NOTL News Crew

Town Hall on Four Mile Creek Road had two separate kinds of business on its hands this week. One was procedural and final: nominations for the October 26 election closed at 2pm today, the field for Lord Mayor and council locked in whether anyone likes the names on it or not. The other is still very much unresolved. Twelve days ago, this town's integrity commissioner ruled on whether the sitting Lord Mayor should have had a say in the future of the Rand Estate. He decided Zalepa made an honest mistake. The resident who filed the complaint thinks that's not really the point, and that the decision about what happens next was never the commissioner's to make alone. Both stories are about who gets to decide things around here, just from opposite ends of the same question.

On June 2, Lord Mayor Gary Zalepa sat in on a committee-of-the-whole discussion about the future of the Rand Estate, the sprawling proposal for a five-storey, 111-room Ritz-Carlton hotel, a spa, and five three-storey residential buildings holding up to 270 units. His own property sits roughly 65 metres from the development lands, well inside the 120-metre radius that triggers a formal notification requirement and, under the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, a presumption that he has a pecuniary interest in the outcome. Kathryn Podrebarac, a lawyer who lives near the estate, wrote to Zalepa beforehand asking him to declare the conflict and step aside. He didn't. She filed a formal complaint on July 8.

The town's integrity commissioners, Jeffrey Abrams and Janice Atwood-Petkovski of the firm Principles Integrity, delivered their disposition on August 10. Their finding: Zalepa shouldn't have participated, but it was "an error in judgment made in good faith," not a deliberate breach. And because the town's protocol only requires reporting complaints that are "sustained," and this one was found "not sustained," the file was closed without ever going to council. Abrams's own explanation for that read as more procedural than dismissive: "It is not a case of 'disregarding' provisions of the code of conduct. It is a question of providing reasonable interpretation to the policy."

Podrebarac isn't satisfied, and her objection isn't really about whether Zalepa's mistake was innocent. It's about who gets to decide what happens once a mistake like that is found. "He was entitled to recommend to council what should happen, a penalty, or none," she told Niagara Now. "He wasn't entitled to make that decision himself and close the file... That decision belongs to council, and council never got the chance to make it." It's a sharp distinction: not "was the mayor guilty," but "who was supposed to be in the room when that question got answered," and on her reading, it wasn't supposed to be the commissioner alone.

Zalepa, for his part, isn't interested in relitigating it in public. His emailed statement to Lake Report was measured to the point of saying almost nothing: "While others may continue to debate the disposition... I do not intend to litigate those issues through the media or social media. I remain committed to transparency, accountability and adherence to the guidance provided by the appropriate authorities." He declined to answer Lake Report's specific follow-up questions. The Town, asked how many integrity complaints it's received overall, also declined to say, deferring to the commissioner's office. For what it's worth, Abrams says that if Rand Estate matters come back to council, as they're expected to, he'd expect Zalepa to declare the conflict and recuse himself this time.

That's the version of this story that's closed. But it lands in the middle of a stretch where the question of exactly how much say any one person gets in this town's future keeps coming up. Below, the Strong Mayor briefing item digs into how little of the new, smaller council Zalepa will actually need on side to get his way starting this fall. And in a separate story, Zalepa's name isn't on this fall's municipal ballot at all, he's applied for a newly created, provincially-appointed regional chair job with powers modelled on the same Strong Mayor legislation. Whatever you make of the Rand Estate finding on its own, it's one thread in a much bigger pattern worth watching this election season.

Whoever residents elect Lord Mayor in October won't need much of the new, smaller council on side to get things done. NOTL's Lord Mayor was designated a "strong mayor" under Ontario's Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act by provincial regulation effective May 1, 2025, powers confirmed on the Town's own website: proposing the municipal budget subject to council veto, but able to veto council's amendments right back with just two councillors' support, appointing or dismissing the CAO and department heads, and proposing or vetoing bylaws tied to provincial housing targets, also with only two councillors on side. Layer on council shrinking from eight members to six, a change council voted for on March 24 and the province made official this year. The math gets tighter: overriding a mayoral veto takes two-thirds of the new seven-person council, five votes, which means a Lord Mayor plus two allied councillors can block an override even if the other four all want one. The NOTL Residents Association is pushing this as a public awareness campaign ahead of October, calling it "one of the most significant shifts in local governance in the town's history" and urging residents to email [email protected] if concerned. Lord Mayor Zalepa's own past defence of the powers: "A smaller Council is not a weaker Council; it is a more focused, more accountable, and more effective one." Worth forming your own opinion on before you vote, whichever side of that you land on.

For the first time in 20 years, Zalepa's name won't be on a NOTL ballot this fall. Instead he's applied for the newly created, provincially-appointed Niagara Region chair job, a position created by the Better Regional Governance Act, which eliminates all 19 of Niagara's elected regional councillors and hands the appointed chair "strong chair" powers mirroring the Strong Mayor legislation below: proposing budgets, vetoing bylaws that conflict with provincial priorities with only a third of council's support needed to sustain the veto, and directing senior staff directly. He's up against Peter Secord, an outgoing St. Catharines regional councillor, and Frank Campion, Welland's retiring mayor. Deputy Lord Mayor Erwin Wiens, one of the three candidates now running for Zalepa's old job, is backing the move: "It's a policy job, not a political job... I wish him luck." Zalepa currently works full-time in Vancouver as a Century 21 executive and would step away from that if appointed. He'd be the first NOTL Lord Mayor since Gary Burroughs, now an incumbent councillor running for re-election, not to seek another term here.

The Niagara Peninsula grows about 80 per cent of the peaches sold in Canada, and University of Guelph plant biologist Dr. Jayasankar Subramanian says this summer's flooding put a lot of that supply at real risk. Peach and plum trees are shallow-rooted and die fast when waterlogged, and with more than 30 centimetres of rain hitting the region this month, he expects a production decline as soon as next year and prices to follow. "Almost certainly, we will see prices higher in the next year," he says, adding it could take seven years of normal weather to fully recover, and that flooded nurseries mean even replacement trees may be hard to source. Something to keep in mind next time a farmer at the market names a number that sounds high.

The Town says it has logged 282 flooding-related service requests through My.NOTL, the customer service platform that happened to soft-launch just two days before the first flood hit. Fifty households registered for a special flood-waste collection that ran August 17. Staff were set to meet with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing this week to talk through eligibility for the province's Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians program, though it's the province, not the Town, that decides whether that program gets activated. No new information on the alert level itself: still sitting at Medium, unchanged since July 31.

The local food bank and thrift organization says it's temporarily pausing all donations, its sorting and storage space is at capacity and it's prioritizing volunteer safety over taking in more right now. It says the pause is short-term and it'll announce when it's ready to accept again. A good problem to have, generosity outpacing storage space, but worth knowing before you make a special trip.

Spencer Tomczuk captained the Niagara North Stars U16 AAA team through a season complicated by an eventual diagnosis of hyperthyroidism, then got picked by the Kingston Frontenacs in June, 276th overall. "He still showed up every game and practised and gave everything he had," says former coach Jason Glenney. "By the end of the season he was nearly back to 100 per cent." Tomczuk, a Virgil kid who started at the Wolves before moving up to Niagara North eight years ago, suits up for the St. Catharines Falcons Jr. B this fall while he works toward Kingston's main camp at the end of August. His mom Jodi, an ER nurse, is mostly just relieved the junior team supplies the sticks now.

Three people ran for Lord Mayor: Vaughn Goettler, Andrea Kaiser, and Deputy Lord Mayor Erwin Wiens, a late entry who wasn't in the race a week ago. Seven people want the six available council seats, among them first-term councillor Tim Balasiuk, who's built his campaign on a case for quiet diligence over visibility. "I'm not going to speak for the sake of speaking," he says of his low-key first term. "I read the reports, and I did my homework." His priorities for a second term: the old hospital site at 172 Wellington, the Dock Area study, and stormwater infrastructure after his own Garrison Village home flooded twice this summer. The other six council names are Maria Mavridis, Gary Burroughs, Steve McGuinness, Weston Miller, Andrew Niven and incumbent Sandra O'Connor. Nothing on this list is official until town clerk Grant Bivol certifies it by 4pm Monday, August 24.

Back in April, developer Benny Marotta's crew started dismantling the 1830s stone schoolhouse on the Niagara River Parkway without the town's approval, work the town's building division classified as a demolition and shut down with a stop-work order. The fix, approved by the heritage committee Aug. 5: take the building apart stone by stone and rebuild it closer to the Parkway, since a structural engineer determined the masonry couldn't survive being moved intact. "Moving a stone building is fraught with danger," said heritage consultant Mark Schultz. "The slightest mishap and you have a pile of not even Lego bricks, because they don't go back together that way." It's the last physical trace of the Glencairn estate, whose main hall burned down in 2025, and the move comes with a condition: a commemorative plaque explaining what it actually is.

You've probably seen Lizzy around The Club at White Oaks, always with a smile for whoever walks in. This month she came home from the 2026 Special Olympics Canada Summer Games in Medicine Hat, Alberta with four medals in 10-pin bowling: gold in Teams, silver in Doubles, bronze in Singles, and bronze in Overall Pinfall. It's the kind of result that takes years of practice most people never see, the early mornings at the lanes, the repetition, the parts of getting good at something that don't make it onto anyone's feed. The Club's own team put it simply: "we are so proud of you and honoured to celebrate this amazing achievement of yours." Four medals at a national championship is a real achievement by any standard, Special Olympics or otherwise, and it happened to someone most of NOTL walks past without knowing her name.

Where to find her: around The Club at White Oaks, same as always.

Nominations closed today, and this issue's got a lot in it about who actually gets to make the calls around here, whether that's council, an integrity commissioner, or one very powerful chair. Where should that line sit, in your view: should elected councillors always get final say, or are there decisions better left to an appointed process?

Reply to this email. Best answers run next issue.