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POST Tillsonburg NTER CLEARANCE BLOWOUT FEBRUARY 19, 2026
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New bus provider coming to Tillsonburg JEFF HELSDON Editor
1.
Tillsonburg will have a new bus provider, starting April
Council approved a bid from OnexBus of Brampton through an RFP process that will save more than $800,000 over the five-year term of the contract. OnexBus of Brampton and the current provider Voyago were the only companies to submit bids in the RFP process. The submissions were evaluated on a variety of weighted criteria, including cost, qualifications, experience, and vehicle specifications. Onex scored 88.67, compared to Voyago’s 86.86. The total cost of OnexBus over five years is $1.31 million, compared to Voyago’s $2.20 million. Mayor Deb Gilvesy said she wanted to reach out ot another municipality for a reference, but didn’t find any that used OnexBus. “I couldn’t find any municipality where they did daily bus service,” she said to Director of Operations Carlos Reyes. “Is Tillsonburg going to be a test pilot for this company and this service?” Reyes answered that it was a new company started in 2018 that had been providing transit from London to Toronto and from Toronto to Ottawa. The company had been providing extra buses to Brampton and Brantford. “This will be the first five-day-a-week operation,” he said. The operation will be supervised by the town’s transit coordinator, who will ensure the service is being provided. Answering a further question from the mayor about whether there was a clause the town could opt out of if it was not happy with the service, Reyes said there was. CONTINUED TO PAGE 2
LEAPIN’ LIZARDS
Reptilia London is a regular at Tillsonburg’s Family Day and is always popular with youth checking out the snakes, turtles, lizards and spiders in the display. Byron Snow, right, of Reptilia showed Callum Molnar and Josephine Penner a northern blue tongue skink. See more coverage on Page 11.
Council defers recommendation on boundary expansion committee JEFF HELSDON Editor
Tillsonburg council took a wait-and-see approach to a suggestion from its Economic Development Advisory Committee to establish a separate committee to look at boundary adjustments. The committee earlier commented last fall on an Oxford County land needs study which recommended the long-term planning goal for Tillsonburg’s institutional/commercial lands be set at 15 per cent. Its recommendation was there was a short-
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age of institutional/commercial lands, this number should be bumped to 30 per cent and a town boundary expansion would be needed to facilitate it as most remaining developable land is already slotted for residential. At the Feb. 9 meeting, a resolution from the committee suggested a committee be struck solely to look at the boundary adjustment issue. The town had a separate boundary adjustment committee until 2023, when its responsibilities were folded into the Economic Development Advisory Committee (EDAC) as it was largely inactive. CONTINUED TO PAGE 5
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