“I have to explain that we’re driving the bus, we just can’t get anybody on it,” Gilbert said. “There’s no way they can come up with any other property — in my opinion. They’ve thrown this other chunk of property in there … they say it’s $12 million to service it and you’d have to annex it into Parry Sound so it’s six years to try and get that done.”

Coun. Steve Crookshanks said struggling with this issue just shows that amalgamation is necessary.

“Our seven municipalities are a bunch of family members trying to come to an agreement, it’s very difficult. We’ve got past history that proves that … this is a crossroad for our community and if we can’t bring this together then I think we are just waving a great big flag to Queen’s Park to say you’ve got to come do something about this community,” he said.

Coun. Susan Murphy agreed with Konoval.

“However, we said we’re in … I don’t think it would be good for us to back out at this point … I grew up in Parry Sound … I don’t know what’s wrong … Huntsville, Bracebridge, Gravenhurst — there’s stuff going on (but) it’s not happening here,” she said. “(The request for proposal is) underway, I think we should flush our money down the drain, along with everybody else — although it hurts to do so, because we’ve got money to spend here, in our community.”

Carling’s chief administrative officer/clerk Kevin McIllwain said the request for proposal is nothing more than a stall tactic.

“It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that paying $2.5 million for … property that’s too small, is not a good idea for the community. Why we’re wasting engineering time and (environmental assessment) time and grant application time to do something that is obviously not in the best interest of the region or the town or anybody is beyond me. It’s a stall tactic, in my opinion, for certain people at the table that don’t want to see this moving forward. And we know who those people are, because they’ve been vocal about it. And they’re at the staff level … we have to hold our nose and go along, but we need to be a loud voice at the table to stop this from being stupid, because that’s where it’s heading.”

Calling for a recorded vote, everyone except Konoval voted in favour of giving $17,000 for the request for proposal.