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Centre Wellington defers decision on termite problem

Updated information must also be reviewed before council can make decision
20230131-termites-jg
Termites.

ELORA — Since new information has emerged related to the local termite problem in Centre Wellington, that information will have to be understood before council can make a decision on how to tackle the issue.

At the start of Monday’s Centre Wellington council meeting, mayor Shawn Watters withdrew the termite discussion from the agenda.

“The reason I’d like to pull from the agenda, we’ve received some new information in the last few days that staff is going through, and I’d like to go through that with staff, and then obviously bring that back to council, we’re thinking around March,” Watters said.

At that Monday council meeting, council was supposed to agree to support the second of three options to fight the local termite issue. 

Option one was for council to have a termite management program set up for a single vendor that would fight the local termites, help the relevant property owners and deliver termite education. The second option, that council was to support, was to help people pay for the cost of fighting termites themselves. Or the third option, council could do nothing.

The eastern subterranean termite was first found in the Windsor area in the 1920s. In the 1970s, that type of termite was in 30 municipalities in Ontario, including Elora and Fergus.

In 2021, a survey determined the termite was present in 259 properties in Elora and Fergus.

The plan is for council to revisit the problem in March

Jesse Gault is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.