It looks like the status quo will stay in place for the size of Chatham-Kent council and the boundaries of the municipality's wards.
A motion brought forward by Ward 4 Councillor Rhonda Jubenville in February was quashed Monday night when the decision to award the contract to Strategy Corp failed with a vote of 8-8.
Previous municipal reviews of the ward boundaries were completed in 2008, 2011, and 2015, though no adjustments have been made to the map.
"I really feel, since this hasn't been addressed since amalgamation, we owe it to our constituents to have this review to bring things up to date," Jubenville explained.
While the vote was simply about having the review done, not about actually implementing changes, half of council was vehemently against it.
Ward 3 Councillor Trevor Thompson was much more vocal about the half of the motion that would reduce the size of council than the restructuring of the wards, but it was an all-or-nothing motion that linked the two together.
"I was actually kind of heartened to see that Strategy Corp won [the contract]. I think they do great work," Thompson said. "But this is not a road that we should be going down."
Ward 6 Councillor Brock McGregor was on the opposite side.
"This has been an ongoing issue," he said. "It's something that should have been done before and even when we do this, it should be something that's done again."
McGregor described the ward boundary review as a process that should be done with regularity. "The community has changed, representation needs to change."
He added that if council decides not to change anything they could at least tell the community that it's a recent decision and not something decided for them 25 years ago.
"We do have some responsibility to say 'hey, that was some time ago, here's the new information we have, here's the process we went through, it was a public process, a third party was involved, it wasn't politicians picking voters...' I think we have a responsibility to move forward with this no matter how you pre-judge the results of this process," McGregor said.
Councillors Allin, Bondy, Hall, Harrigan, Jubenville, B. McGregor, Storey, and Mayor Canniff voted for the motion.
Councillors Anderson, Ceccacci, Crew, Doyle, Finn, McGrail, Thompson, and Wright voted against it.
Ward 5 Councillor Carmen McGregor wasn't present for the vote and Ward 3 Councillor Steve Pinsonneault has taken a leave of absence from council to run in the Lambton-Kent-Middlesex by-election.
Municipal Clerk Judy Smith told council that since the direction to go out and find a third party to conduct the review failed administration will assume that no further work needs to be done on this matter. If anyone wanted to ask for an internal review of the boundary lines, it would require a new notice of motion.