On July 10, 2025, the Sunbury-York South council held a meeting that lasted one minute. Acting clerk Leslie Morrell stood up, read a provincial regulation into the record, and sat back down. The regulation said the same thing in plain terms: council no longer had enough members to legally do anything. Two councillors had resigned in the previous week, the mayor was mid-suspension, and the rural community that includes Waasis, Rusagonis, Nasonworth, Beaver Dam, and Charters Settlement was, for all practical purposes, ungoverned.
If you live in Waasis and only half-followed this story on Facebook or in passing CBC headlines, here is the part most people missed. That one-minute meeting wasn't the bottom. It was the middle of a stretch that ran from a rejected $8 million building loan in late 2024 through a full provincial takeover that left residents with zero elected voice for the better part of a year, ending only when voters got their first real chance to sort it out in May 2026.
How It Got Here
Sunbury-York South is young as municipalities go. It was incorporated on January 1, 2023, folding the former local service districts of New Maryland and Rusagonis-Waasis, plus a small piece of Tracyville-Three Tree Creek, into one rural community. Waasis and Rusagonis have never had their own town hall. The council has been renting office space in Oromocto since the amalgamation.
That gap became the first flashpoint. In late 2024, then-mayor David Hayward asked the province's Municipal Capital Borrowing Board for pre-approval to borrow up to $8 million for a new municipal building. Residents who caught wind of it were not thrilled. Some started calling it the "Taj Mahal loan."
"I personally don't see the need to spend that sort of money," resident Jeanne Clarke-Walker told CBC's Information Morning Fredericton at the time, adding that she and her husband live rurally in part for the lower tax rate.
Another resident, Carolyn Nickerson, pointed out that the council seemed to be measuring itself against its westerly neighbor, Hanwell, despite having a different population and tax base entirely. She and others also raised concerns that roughly 30 acres of land had already been purchased for the project without much public notice. The loan request was eventually withdrawn, but the friction it exposed between council and residents didn't go away. It just moved to a different stage.
The Resignations
Through the first half of 2025, the council lost people one at a time.
- In January, Councillor Susan Yarom resigned.
- In March, Councillor Gilles Turner resigned.
- Around the same period, the community's chief administrative officer, also named Turner (Marjorie), was terminated after being charged in two separate incidents involving calling police on residents who had come to the municipal office seeking public documents they were legally entitled to. She pleaded not guilty, with a court date set for August 10, 2026.
- In June, council voted that Mayor Hayward had broken the code of conduct, triggering a 90-day suspension.
- On July 3, Councillor Tegan Noble resigned.
- On July 9, Councillor Matthew Standish resigned.
A rural community council normally runs with eight members and needs five present to hit quorum. There was already one vacancy on the books before Noble and Standish left. By July 10, the math no longer worked, hence the one-minute meeting.
The plan, at that point, was to wait it out. Hayward's suspension was due to end in September, and once he returned, the remaining four councillors, Hajnalka Hartwick, Larry DeLong, Matthew Sheppard, and Cory Allen, would technically have quorum again. The Local Governance Commission's director, Mary Oley, confirmed as much: a suspended mayor still counts as a council member for quorum purposes.
Hayward never came back.
What a Supervisor Actually Means
On September 28, 2025, instead of resuming his seat, Hayward resigned outright. That single decision took the vacancy problem from temporary to structural. With no mayor and no path back to five sitting members, the province appointed a supervisor, Greg Lutes, to run Sunbury-York South directly.
This is the part worth sitting with if you live here. A supervisor isn't a caretaker who checks in on council meetings. Under the arrangement Oley described to CBC, once a supervisor is appointed, the remaining elected councillors cannot act as councillors at all. The supervisor becomes the council. Lutes held the role until October 27, 2025, and a second appointed supervisor carried it from there until the next municipal election.
Councillor Cory Allen, one of the four who had stayed through everything, said he was blindsided by Hayward's exit specifically because of what it took away from residents. He told CBC he was "absolutely shocked, first of all, stunned," and that he hadn't expected someone who wanted to work for the community to resign rather than finish the term. From late September 2025 until a new council was sworn in, nobody in Waasis, Rusagonis, Nasonworth, Beaver Dam, or Charters Settlement had a vote that mattered locally. Every decision ran through an appointee, not a resident.
The Councillor Who Stayed
New Brunswick held municipal elections across the province in May 2026, and Sunbury-York South's own statement on the timeline noted that the earliest a new council could take the oath of office was May 23, 2026, the earliest point the supervisor's authority would end.
Voters had a clear choice on the ballot: Cory Allen, the councillor who had stayed on through the resignations, the suspension, and the supervisor period, running against Larry DeLong, who had served as deputy mayor and acting mayor during parts of the chaos. Allen won by roughly 600 votes, a decisive margin for a rural community election.
It reads like a vote on character as much as on policy. The person who kept showing up through a year that included a rejected loan request, five departures from council, a fired CAO facing charges, and a total loss of local governance for eight months is now the one residents chose to lead.
Where Things Stand Now
If you have been out of the loop, here is the short version for anyone in Waasis today. Sunbury-York South has an elected mayor and council again as of late May 2026, ending the longest stretch the rural community has gone without local representation since it was created. The municipal office is still a rented space in Oromocto rather than a purpose-built town hall, which means the underlying question that started all of this in 2024, where and how this community should eventually house its own government, has not actually been settled. It has just been paused while everyone caught their breath.
The former CAO's charges were still open as of her last scheduled court appearance, set for August 10, 2026. We don't have confirmation of how that hearing went, but it's worth knowing if you see the case referenced in future council minutes or local reporting.
None of this changes what makes Waasis worth living in day to day. It does explain why your council seemed to vanish for the better part of a year, and why the name on the mayor's door changed the way it did. If you want the fuller picture of what makes this stretch of the Sunbury-York South corridor tick, the Waasis neighborhood guide and the Rusagonis guide cover the parts of daily life this post didn't touch.
Got questions about what any of this means for your corner of the community, or just want to talk through what's actually going on around here? Megan Gallant has lived in this area for more than 30 years and is always happy to compare notes. Let's Talk.
