The Town of Lincoln will have a smaller city council following next year’s municipal election, after councillors voted 6-3 to reduce the number of wards from four to three, which in turn will reduce the number of councillors from eight to six.
Voters in Lincoln will continue to elect two councillors per ward, as well as a mayor at large.
That means the total number of municipal politicians following next October’s election will be seven.
Council had previously engaged the services of Watson & Associates Limited to give the Town of Lincoln some options to ensure that there is relative population parity amongst Lincoln’s wards going forward.
The report, prepared in consultation with Professor Zachary Spicer, offered a couple of different pathways forward, including rebalancing the current four-ward system or slimming down to a three-ward system, which was the ultimate recommendation of the report.
Councillors decided by a strong margin to shift toward a three-ward system.
The need for change was triggered by population growth in the present Ward 1 and Ward 2, which would have led to significant population imbalance amongst the wards if left unaddressed.
Only Councillors Greg Reimer (Ward 4), Dianne Rintjema (Ward 1), and Lynn Timmers (Ward 4) opposed the move, with Reimer putting forward a failed motion to rebalance the boundaries of the existing four wards rather than reduce the overall number of wards to three.
Mayor Sandra Easton, along with Councillors Adam Russell (Ward 1), Tony Brunet (Ward 2), JD Pachereva (Ward 2), Mike Mikolic (Ward 3), and Anna Murre (Ward 3) voted to support the change to a three-ward system.
Spicer offer a couple of rationales to support reducing the size of council.
First, Spicer pointed to “increased legislative efficiency.”
Second, Spicer said a three-ward system would bring the Town of Lincoln “into line with comparably sized municipalities outside of the region of Niagara.”
Beginning with the 2026 municipal election, Ward 1 will run from Lincoln Avenue to Cherry Avenue and from Lake Ontario to King Street.
Ward 2 will begin at the southwest corner of the municipality and run all the way north to Lake Ontario. It will then run down Lincoln Avenue, across King Street, and down Cherry Avenue to Twenty Mile Road.
Ward 3 will have Cherry Avenue as its western boundary, run up and all the way across Lake Ontario in the north, reach the border with St. Catharines in the east and run south to roughly Pelham Road.
While there was an online survey public consultation piece involved in the ward rebalancing process, only 76 members of the public chose to participate.
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
