How I Got Here
By Melissa Reid — June 7, 2026
The sudden, unceremonious collapse of the proposed downtown inflatable water park at Flora MacDonald Confederation Basin is a textbook example of a systemic failure at Kingston City Hall. For nearly a year, residents were treated to a steady stream of glossy promotional materials and bold headlines celebrating a $3-million flagship tourist attraction, anchored by a heavily hyped $1-million corporate naming-rights deal.
Then, the public learned the truth: the corporate negotiations collapsed, the sponsorship vanished, and the entire floating obstacle course was abruptly shelved.
If you are looking for a masterclass in fumbling basic risk mitigation, this is it. This saga exposes exactly what happens when a city prioritizes public relations over robust, upfront contract accountability. When capital projects are designed from the top-down to generate flashy headlines rather than secure, risk-managed infrastructure, our community pays the price — not just in wasted staff time and stalled development, but in the continuous erosion of public trust.
Yet, instead of pausing for a moment of self-reflection, Council voted 9-3 to push ahead with a stripped-down, enhanced swimming platform downtown at a potential cost of $400,000, while simultaneously directing staff to explore moving future inflatable water park concepts out to Grass Creek Park. The primary plan failed, so the backup plan is to spend nearly half a million tax dollars on a remnant dock while spinning up a whole new round of bureaucratic red tape on the city's outskirts. It would be funny if it weren't our money.
The Compliance Double Standard
I have been entirely ruthless in my response to what I have uncovered and brought forward regarding the City of Kingston's operations, and this situation highlights exactly why. The true absurdity of Kingston's governance model lies in its enforcement of a blatant double standard.
When independent community groups or grassroots teams try to launch a local initiative to meet an urgent need, they don't get meaningful municipal support — they get a hard time from the city. They are forced to navigate endless risk-assessment matrices, prove absolute liability coverage, and jump through bureaucratic hoops just to get permission to help their neighbors. City Hall demands ironclad risk mitigation from everyone else before a single permit is stamped.
Yet, when the city manages its own operations, that rigorous oversight completely vanishes. Look no further than the financial disaster at the Kingston Area Taxi Commission (KATC). While grassroots community workers are given a hard time over the slightest operational details, a city-backed commission was permitted to quietly spiral into chaos. City Council was forced to bail out the commission by advancing $400,000 from taxpayer reserve funds to cover unpaid payroll taxes, massive consulting fees, and a costly Superior Court judgment stemming from a toxic work environment. The administration failed to oversee its own regulatory body, left a critical accessible transit program running a deep deficit, and then stuck Kingston taxpayers with a $400,000 bill to clean up the mess.
Whether it's signing onto a multi-million-dollar waterfront contract based on a handshake and a prayer, bailing out a mismanaged commission with hundreds of thousands of public dollars, or leaving volunteers to absorb the unchecked legal and physical liability of moving vital resources through a hot city park, the administration consistently exempts itself from the very standards it enforces on the public. They don't manage risk; they outsource it to the community and hope nobody notices the gap between their rigid rules and their actual performance.
We see this exact same structural negligence happening right now at the Belle Park site — the absolute epicenter of the crisis facing our district — where the city prefers to manufacture an emergency rather than deploy functional public infrastructure.
Consider how the city handles basic hydration during the hottest months of the year. Instead of distributing clean drinking water directly to the people who need it, the administration dumps bulk shipments of single-use plastic bottles blocks away at a designated drop-off point and washes its hands of the rest. Because municipal management refuses to bridge that final logistical gap, the task falls completely onto grassroots volunteers.
I know the exact physical and operational cost of this system because I have personally picked up and moved this water. On Saturdays and Sundays, because the city's distribution hub is entirely closed, volunteers are left with no choice but to handle the gap themselves. Every single pickup requires manually loading, transporting, and unloading between 30 and 35 heavy cases of water bottles using our own personal vehicles, operating without any corporate safety net or insurance, bearing 100% of the physical and legal liability. This administrative shortcut floods the park with over 77,000 plastic bottles every summer. The physical toll is real — one volunteer even suffered a severe hernia trying to bridge this exact operational gap. It seems breaking the backs of your own citizens to avoid doing your job is just standard municipal operating procedure in Kingston.
The financial logistics behind this operation are genuinely embarrassing. The city spends $9,600 purchasing these single-use bottles, only to cut a second round of checks to private industrial waste contractors for up to $12,000 over the summer just to haul that same plastic away. That's over $21,000 of public money burned to manufacture a crisis, worsen stigma, and line corporate pockets.
The irony of City Hall panicking over park cleanliness and environmental aesthetics at Belle Park is exceptionally rich when you look at the historical data. The city is, after all, a legally convicted polluter; in the late 1990s, the municipality was successfully prosecuted under the federal Fisheries Act for allowing toxic landfill runoff from this exact location to leach into the Cataraqui River (R. v. City of Kingston, 1998). Today, the administration has the audacity to point fingers at vulnerable residents for a refuse crisis they engineered, completely ignoring their own criminal record on the very same soil.
Just like the waterfront water park, the solution to the Belle Park crisis is sitting completely idle in a city yard: a 1,400-litre mobile Water Buggy that costs a grand total of $5.22 in raw water to fill. Deploying a unionized worker to station that trailer at the park for just three hours a day during peak local lunch hours would eliminate the plastic waste entirely, protect community volunteers from injury, and cost just $10,968 for the entire summer. The difference between a toxic, injurious, $21,000 plastic nightmare and a professional, insured municipal utility is a whopping $1,340.
Rooted in Infrastructure, Driven by Legacy
My impatience with these circular administrative games isn't just professional; it's deeply personal. As a fifth-generation Kingstonian, my roots are firmly tangled in the physical, industrial, and cultural foundations of this city. Generations of my family literally built and led the mechanical contracting infrastructure that keeps Kingston running smoothly behind the scenes. We have always understood that if the foundational systems do not work, the entire structure fails.
Furthermore, leadership means seeing an unaddressed gap in the community and doing the heavy lifting to bridge it. My great-grandmother was a French teacher, a contributing journalist for local media, and a formidable matriarch who single-handedly cultivated the local French educational and cultural community. She looked at a city where her community was given no space to thrive, and instead of waiting around for permission or an administrative committee to approve it, she rolled up her sleeves and built that infrastructure from scratch — founding Salon Brisebois and establishing a cultural legacy that remains physically anchored in our city's public spaces today.
That is the standard of leadership I was raised on: you build things that work, you design systems that protect the vulnerable, and you hold municipiven standard of absolute accountability.
Why I Am the Leader This District Needs
When a district faces a compounding operational and financial crisis, it doesn't need a career politician who manages from a desk or acts as a rubber stamp for management's optical illusions. It needs an infrastructure-minded realist who understands that asset mismanagement on one side of the city directly impacts the tax rates and services on the other.
And that is exactly why I am running for City Council in District 11.
I am not a one-issue candidate, because the dysfunction at City Hall is not a one-issue problem. Whether it is a multi-million-dollar waterfront debacle downtown, a $400,000 bailout for a broken taxi commission, or a circular, expensive waste contract at an old landfill site, the underlying failure is identical: a complete lack of operational oversight and fiscal accountability. I am running because the residents of District 11 — our homeowners, small business owners, and working families — deserve a representative who treats public funds with absolute respect.
Hasn't this city waited long enough for change that actually works? For years, Kingstonians have watched the same predictable bureaucratic patterns play out, resulting in the same costly, unforced errors. We have been told to wait for next year's budget, next quarter's report, or the next committee evaluation. But the status quo isn't working, and taxpayers are tired of footing the bill for grand plans that evaporate into thin air. We need practical, common-sense governance that addresses municipal leaks today, not polished promises for tomorrow.
I am not offering campaign platitudes; I am offering a direct application of my professional background in program evaluation and data collection. I look at municipal operations through a strict, data-driven framework: where is our money going, does the system actually work, and how do we stabilize it?
True accountability means putting every major municipal project and oversight body through rigorous risk-management evaluations before they become public liabilities. It means deploying our existing, idle municipal assets to solve problems cheaply and efficiently, instead of outsourcing risk and cutting blank checks to clean up predictable administrative messes.
My commitment to this district is entirely boots-on-the-ground, built on a deep family lineage that laid Kingston's physical foundation and a personal standard that refuses to tolerate administrative double standards. The fiscal and operational leaks in our city budget are entirely fixable, but it requires a leader who knows the logistics, owns the data, and has the grit to stand up and demand accountability for every single dollar spent. It is time to end the politics of optics and finally choose Lives Over Optics.
Melissa Reid is a fifth-generation Kingstonian, a certified specialist in program evaluation and data collection, and a candidate for Kingston City Council in District 11.