New North Huron CAO Nelson Santos is ready to get to work
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Earlier this month, North Huron’s search for a new Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) came to an end with the announcement that multi-hyphenate Nelson Santos would be stepping into the role. Santos had now been on the job for a little over a week when The Citizen stopped by his office at the Town Hall in Wingham for a quick chat about the long and winding road that brought him to the hot seat in North Huron, as well as a rundown of all that he’s accomplished in the past seven days.
Santos is no stranger to municipal governance. Since entering Essex County politics at the age of 27, he’s served as a councillor, a warden, and the five-term mayor of Kingsville, Ontario. Along the way, he’s also found the time to be a reporter, a newspaper editor, a photographer, a real estate agent, and a wildlife enthusiast. “I bring quite a realm of different experiences to support the role,” he told The Citizen. “I also have two years of experience as a CAO in a community in Simcoe County - a very small community, a rural community, with a population of 11,000, but we were seeing the pressures of growth from the GTA and into Simcoe County. Understanding the value of maintaining the character of a community while you’re growing is very important.”
In his opinion, North Huron has a lot to offer young families. “I admire the levels of service and recreation facilities that this small community actually has when I come from other communities of 11,000 and 22,000, and they don’t have facilities such as a swimming pool,” he explained. “So you want to be able to celebrate those, and make those as functional and feasible, and create as much feasible economically for the community.”
He sees the hospital as a huge strength for North Huron. “It’s an opportunity to strengthen care in the community. But also, how can we support it, as a community, to ensure we’re attracting the physicians, the nurses and the health care officials, so that we can say we have a community that can care for you?”
Santos also has his eye on agriculture. “It’s a critical piece of our overall economy, and it’s the lifeblood of some of our communities here,” he pointed out. He grew up working on his grandfather’s farm, so he understands how much work it is. “[My grandfather] was a cash crop farmer, so we did everything from planting to harvesting,” he recalled. “Driving the tractor when I was, like, five years old was my first lesson… I worked with my grandpa until I was 17, and then I moved to another farm,” he recalled. “So I’m very familiar with the hard work; getting my fingers dirty, my hands dirty. But I’ve also been involved with the advancement of agriculture, and how the processing has changed. The greenhouse sector, for example, back home is very significant for North America - the Kingsville-Leamington sector, and being engaged in understanding the needs of the agriculture community is big.”
Another profession that taught Santos the value of getting his hands dirty was his long tenure as a print media journalist. “When I started, we had a dark room. We actually had wax paper, and wax machines, and we had light tables,” he remembered. “So we went from cutting our pieces and printing our pages onto the wax pages, then putting it to the press, and then suddenly, when technology took over, we transferred from film cameras to digital cameras. We went away from the wax paper and the wax machines, and I didn’t have sticky fingers or spotted wax fingerprints across the office!”
Working at his local paper was one of the many factors that led Santos to enter politics. “I found I learned something new every day; at the end of the day, when I was working the beat, it was what I could learn,” he explained. “And that’s what opened the door for my continued desire to learn more.”
When Santos first started out in politics, it was during a unique time in the history of Ontario: amalgamation. “That was a good one!” he declared. “There was obviously a lot of stress between communities. Nineteen-ninety-seven was our last year of maintaining our identity as one community - the following election was the amalgamation election. So, having served a term understanding the original municipality prior to amalgamation, and then merging three altogether - it identified the critical pieces. What was available in one community versus others? How can we best serve the new municipality as a whole, for the greater good? That was the mentality we took.”
Amalgamation was a momentous task that required a “big picture” perspective. “There was a review and analysis of what services, what facilities were available in one community, and starting to learn what other facilities were available in neighbouring communities, and how they can all come together and kind of mesh, in a broader sense… that was a big transition.” The key to managing it, in Santos’ opinion, was trying to turn a sense of loss of community to a feeling that the community was gaining strength by coming together.
It also involved not just maintaining service levels, but respecting the unique culture of each individual town, pre-amalgamation. “If one community had a certain festival, we wanted to embrace it now as part of the entire new municipality, and ensure that it became part of our ongoing culture…. We didn’t try to shut anything down, we tried to bring everything in as a big family and say ‘oh, now there’s an opportunity for us to learn more about your festival, and celebrate it…. I think the key fixtures within communities were maintained and sustained, and that was the critical piece to overall success… it was an opportunity to put all of our assets together, and see how much stronger we can be, you know, working together towards those goals.”
For much of his political career, Santos was the mayor of Kingsville, Ontario - a job he retired from in 2022. “I don’t miss the seven-days-a-week rule, when you’re getting calls at two o’clock in the morning,” he joked. “What I do miss about being there is the day-to-day engagement with the public. For example, the school kids - the opportunity to visit them and try to inspire them to become the best that they could be to support their community… being able to communicate at that level with the youth and the residents was critical to me.”
Santos feels that the varied experiences of all these different positions makes him perfectly suited to be North Huron’s new CAO. “Municipalities aren’t just ‘one service fits all,’” he pointed out. “I think what I see, from my first real week, and my interactions with the Threshers group and with the Blyth Festival people yesterday, is the sense that there’s a lot of moving parts, that, if we work with them collectively, we can see great success.”
Now that he’s started the process of settling in, there are a few things that Santos is hoping to get going, right off the hop. “For us right now, it’s trying to get that sense of stability… ensuring we have all the people in place to help us see our projects come to completion. Capital work is one I’ve seen as a top priority for us, so the residents can see the investment from the budget is translated into investment in infrastructure, and investment in successful projects.”
Another thing at the top of Santos’ to-do list: improving communication with the community. “There’s nothing to hide,” he told The Citizen. “We’re on the same side. We’re working towards, I think, similar goals.” He feels that this is one of the many cases in which consistency is key. “With more consistent communications, we’ll both understand where we are, and where we’re going,” he explained. “We want to be predictable and sustainable, at the end of the day.
“At the end of the day, it’s teamwork. I believe it’s important to collaborate, and have an open door. For myself, it’s not just one department - they’re not silos. We have to have that communication between each, so we can understand and better respect each other’s roles… the bigger, overall big picture is: everyone coming together to support Blyth, Wingham, our small communities, our rural farmers. What’s it going to take to ensure that we’re moving forward together?”
With his work cut out for him, Santos isn’t expecting it to be all smooth sailing. “There’ll be bumps along the way - absolutely,” he admitted. “But I think if we can start tackling those little baby steps, seeing that we can work together, we can start moving to larger goals and hopefully, you know, prosperity.”
In his opinion, a great CAO is one with the ability to strike the right balance. “Being able to have the ability to multitask, help prioritize projects and pieces of the community - that’s the operational side of a CAO,” he explained. “For myself, it’s about being engaged with the community, understanding the community.”
He feels that one of the most expedient ways to gain a stronger understanding of that new community is to listen to the people that live here. “I certainly want readers to understand my effort to be engaged,” he said. “I want to learn more about who they are. I certainly respect and love the sense of small community, and I want to contribute to that. I’d like to see if there’s an opportunity for me to volunteer in different groups or areas… I want to make this home, and I'm looking forward to meeting with the residents. My door is open. Please feel free to call. I’m happy to sit down and meet with the residents.”
Santos may be new in town, but he’s already pretty sure that this is the place to be. “Where else would you want to be, when you could be here, in North Huron?” he asked.