Port Burwell Village Association

08/17/2026

**BLUE FLAG BEACH. RED FLAG QUESTIONS.**

Port Burwell Municipal East Beach has experienced repeated adverse E. coli results this summer.

Southwestern Public Health confirmed to PBVA that the last three reported geometric means increased from approximately 338 → 461 → 900 CFU/100 mL. Ontario’s swimming-advisory threshold for the geometric mean is 200 CFU/100 mL.

In the most recent sampling round, SWPH advised that four of the five individual samples were reported as greater than 1,000 CFU/100 mL, with the fifth at 620.

PBVA also confirmed that Port Burwell Provincial Park staff collect the water samples for both the Provincial Park beach and Bayham’s Municipal East Beach.

That makes what happened this past week especially relevant.

The Provincial Park received an adverse result and posted a clear “Beach unsafe for swimming” notice on August 13. The Park then resampled. **By August 14 — the next day — it had received an updated result and publicly advised that its beach was once again safe for swimming.**

Bayham, by contrast, considered additional sampling and decided not to resample the Municipal East Beach.

That real-world comparison matters because, at Bayham’s August 10 Waterfront Advisory Committee meeting, follow-up sampling was framed largely in terms of cost and turnaround time.

Today, August 16, the Municipal East Beach remains posted with Southwestern Public Health warning signs and the Blue Flag is not flying. The RED water-quality flag itself has been removed.

The RED flag is the signal regular beach users have learned to look for. **Removing it while the official SWPH advisory remains RED is perplexing and risks sending mixed messages to beachgoers.**

The attached photographs and screenshots show why timely communication matters.

During the August 10 WAC discussion, attention also shifted to the observation that people continued swimming despite the RED advisory. Members were told that parking transactions were up about 2.5%.

But Bayham’s own mid-year report shows that parking comparison covered only May 1 to June 30 — before the repeated adverse water-quality results in July and August. No July or August-to-date parking transaction data were presented to WAC, nor was there an analysis comparing parking activity with weather conditions and RED advisory periods.

**The parking information presented therefore could not establish that adverse water quality was having little or no effect on beach use.**

And if people were continuing to enter the water despite a RED advisory, that should have strengthened the case for timely follow-up sampling, public education and clear communication.

Perhaps most concerning, nobody in municipal leadership brought the discussion back to WAC’s written role as Bayham’s Blue Flag Beach Management Committee.

The neighbouring Provincial Park showed that follow-up testing could provide useful information to the public by the very next day.

**Bayham considered resampling and chose not to do it. Given the repeated adverse results, that decision deserves a clear explanation.**

That is exactly the kind of issue Bayham’s Blue Flag Beach Management Committee should be examining: timely testing, public education, clear communication, and whether beach users are being given the information they need to make informed decisions.

08/12/2026

This is a simple graphic — but it is also an important reminder of how municipal government is supposed to work.

At the top are **residents**.

Residents elect Council. Residents provide input. Residents ask questions, make delegations, participate in consultations and raise concerns about what is happening in their community.

**Council makes the decisions.**

Municipal staff play an essential professional role by providing Council with information, analysis and recommendations, and by implementing the decisions Council makes. But the democratic authority ultimately rests with the elected Council — and Council is accountable to the residents who elected it.

That relationship matters.

Good municipal government depends on residents being able to understand:

• what decisions are being considered
• what information Council relied upon
• what alternatives were considered
• how public input was taken into account
• how public money is being spent
• and why Council ultimately made the decision it did

And that brings us to the line across the bottom of this graphic:

**ACCOUNTABILITY & TRANSPARENCY**

Council meetings are public. Agendas, reports and decisions should provide residents with a meaningful record of municipal business. Public participation should be welcomed as part of the process — not regarded as an inconvenience to it.

Residents do not have to agree with every Council decision.

But they should be able to **see the process, understand the reasoning, ask questions and hold their elected representatives accountable.**

That isn’t interference with municipal government.

**That is municipal government.**

— Port Burwell Village Association
Our Village. Our Voice. Our Future.

08/09/2026

**DID THE LIGHTHOUSE NEGOTIATIONS REALLY HAVE TO BE SECRET?**

The Port Burwell Lighthouse has a new path forward, and we sincerely hope the Historical Society succeeds in restoring it.

But now that the transaction is complete, there is an important lesson for Bayham about **public engagement**.

For almost two years, negotiations concerning the future ownership of one of Bayham's most important public heritage assets took place largely behind closed doors.

There is nothing unusual or improper about keeping **negotiating details** confidential. Council may need to protect legal advice, financial terms, bargaining positions and proposed agreement provisions while negotiations are underway.

But that does not mean the **process itself had to be invisible**.

Bayham could have told residents that it was exploring a possible transfer of the Lighthouse. It could have explained the objective: finding a sustainable way to restore the structure. It could have told residents what public interests needed to be protected and how the community would eventually be consulted — all without disclosing a single confidential negotiating position.

We know that was possible because Bayham eventually did exactly that.

In September 2025, Mayor Ed Ketchabaw publicly acknowledged that saving the Lighthouse **“may include a sale.”** In December, the CAO acknowledged that Bayham was already in discussions with an organization about the Lighthouse. By January 2026, the CAO publicly confirmed that those discussions involved the **possible transfer and rehabilitation** of the Lighthouse.

The negotiations continued.

So acknowledging that negotiations existed plainly did not make negotiations impossible.

The Closed Meeting Investigator later found that Bayham was entitled to discuss particular negotiating matters behind closed doors. That finding deserves to be accurately represented.

But the investigator did **not** find that the entire Lighthouse process had to remain secret. His review was limited to whether two specific closed meetings complied with the Municipal Act. It did not examine whether Bayham provided meaningful public engagement throughout the broader process.

That distinction matters.

The federal funding opportunity announced in June 2026 explains why the **final weeks became urgent**. It does not explain why residents could not have been engaged during the preceding year and a half.

By the time the public was formally invited to comment, Bayham had already spent considerable time negotiating with the Historical Society, the preferred direction was well advanced, and an urgent funding deadline was approaching.

That is consultation.

It is not necessarily **meaningful public engagement**.

Meaningful engagement happens early enough that residents can still influence the choices being considered — not merely react once the preferred solution has effectively taken shape.

This isn't an argument that every municipal negotiation should occur in public.

It is an argument for a much simpler principle:

**The negotiating details could legitimately be confidential.
The process itself did not have to be invisible.**

Bayham can do better.

And on something as important as the future of the Port Burwell Lighthouse, residents deserved better.

08/01/2026

07/30/2026

**Congratulations to the Port Burwell Historical Society and everyone who has worked to save the Lighthouse.** We sincerely hope the restoration succeeds.

As ownership moves forward, one important question remains:

Will the Lighthouse’s heritage character be protected now and in the future?

The concern is simple:

* the 1985 heritage designation was never registered on title;
* the agreements do not clearly protect important historic features such as the clapboard siding, windows, wooden lantern, staircase, and Fresnel lens; and
* there is no clear registered protection ensuring those features remain protected after the transfer.

This is not criticism of the PB Historical Society. It is about making sure the Lighthouse’s heritage character — the very features that make it historically significant — remains protected for future generations.

We all want the same outcome: a saved Lighthouse, with its heritage value preserved.

07/29/2026

**Bayham Is Selling an Asset It Doesn't Have Clear Title To — For $1. Taxpayers Are Funding the Rest: $253,479.16.**

Council is being asked to approve the sale of the Port Burwell Lighthouse on July 30. Buried in the Agreement of Purchase and Sale is this line, in the Municipality's own words: the Seller — Bayham — "does not have registered title to the property." The sale is conditional on the Municipality first getting title registered in its own name.

This is separate from the heritage designation gap already reported — the 1985 by-law never registered on title. Two different problems, both unresolved, both public record.

So what was the urgency in June that justified skipping normal notice? Nothing in the public record answers that. And now there's a second reason to ask: why the rush to close a sale of land the Municipality doesn't yet clearly own?

Meanwhile, of the 20 detailed questions a resident submitted for the public record — on construction oversight, funding strategy, governance, conflicts of interest — the report Council is voting on answers only a handful. The rest: silence.

And when it comes to the money — nearly $253,000 in reserve funds flowing to PBHS as part of this deal, built up from taxpayer-funded municipal surplus — the accountability built into the agreement runs one way only. The Municipality can inspect PBHS's records, but the agreement requires it to keep anything it finds confidential. The one party positioned to check how the money is spent is contractually bound not to tell you what it finds.

And two days before Council even voted, the Municipality had already booked a media event to celebrate the outcome.

No clear title. No resolved heritage protection. No public accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent. This isn't about whether the lighthouse should be saved. It's about whether the public — and Council — actually knows what it's approving.

None of this is directed at the Port Burwell Historical Society, whose interest in preserving this landmark is understood and appreciated. It's directed at the Municipality's process.

— Port Burwell Village Association

07/25/2026

**Too Urgent to Wait, Too Uncertain to Publish**

The urgency designation is getting harder to justify. Council declared the lighthouse surplus on June 25 under a time-sensitive designation — meaning it couldn't wait until the next regular meeting. The July 7 amended notice confirmed the Municipality and PBHS were still "in the process of drafting the legal framework" and had "agreed to a two-week extension to complete the proposed legal documents in principle."

Now, six days before the July 30 Special Meeting meant to finalize this, the Clerk's July 24 NOTICE states "some complications are preventing certainty on every issue and statement," and that the agenda won't be published that day because the Municipality "does not wish to issue an agenda with supporting documentation that may later require an addendum to revise or contradict key information."

If the terms and supporting information still aren't certain a month after the urgency was invoked, PBVA would ask Council to provide written confirmation of who determined the urgency threshold was met on June 25, and on what documented basis — though experience has shown that questions like this one are consistently left unanswered.

07/25/2026

**No One Is Talking About This: The Lighthouse's Heritage Designation**

History is worth preserving. We only wish this had been reflected in how the lighthouse was actually maintained: institutional neglect of the asset over the past eight years is well documented, from the guide wire stabilization to the $1.5 million restoration estimate never funded.

Our concern was never whether the lighthouse should be saved. It's whether the public gets to see the terms of the deal before commenting matters. To have your comment included in the public agenda report, it must be submitted by July 21 — before the terms are published. So what are we actually commenting on? The idea, not the terms. Comments submitted after July 21 are still accepted, but won't appear in the public record Council actually reviews, and offer little real opportunity for informed input.

But there's a bigger question the community hasn't asked yet: will the heritage protection this landmark actually has survive the transfer?

Here's why this matters: it isn't really about today's decision. It exists so that whoever owns the building tomorrow — and in ten, twenty, fifty years — can't alter or remove its heritage character without going through a public process first. It protects the building from future decisions, not just current ones. The lighthouse was formally designated by by-law in 1985, but the Municipality's own 2024 staff report confirms that designation was never registered on title. That gap has existed for over two years, and nothing in the public record shows it's been fixed. If it isn't fixed before this transfer, the protection the community thought it had for the next fifty years may not actually exist.

That's a question the public deserves an answer to before this transfer is finalized, not after.

None of this is directed at the Port Burwell Historical Society, whose interest in preserving this landmark is understood and appreciated — it's directed at the Municipality's process.

— Port Burwell Village Association