Council looks ahead

Renewed optimism after the challenges of 2020

Last year began like any other before it, with the annual Mayor’s Levee outlining the municipality’s accomplishments of the previous year and providing a set of goals for the current year. The event typically draws in over a hundred residents who get to meet their mayor and councillors and get an advance view of what the municipality’s major plans are. But three months into 2020 and those plans had to be revisited as a relentless global pandemic forced an abrupt shift away from normal. “No one prepared anybody for what was going to occur,” says Mayor Steve Ferguson. “We were preparing for what looked to be a serious flood situation for 2020, and then Mother Nature threw us the curveball of COVID-19. One of the challenges of dealing with that was trying to react to what was coming toward us in terms of federal and provincial regulation. It was the unpredictability of trying to figure out what were the next steps that needed to be taken to protect public safety and the health of our community, while at the same time ensuring that our businesses could operate in some form.”

Despite the turmoil imposed by the pandemic, Council was still able to accomplish much of what was on its agenda for the year. South Marysburgh councillor John Hirsch says that CAO Marcia Wallace, who was hired at the beginning of 2020, played a big role in keeping Council focused on its work. “She [Wallace] was just getting into the scheme of things when the COVID virus hit and dramatically changed our daily activity,” he says. “What’s remarkable was we had all these activities in March and April about how should the County respond and what we could do in terms of our services. Then at the end of April, Marcia came to Council and said ‘Do you want to continue to work on your agenda, or do you want to lay back and only look at essential things?’ We all said let’s go full speed ahead, and she took that quite seriously and we ended up having a full agenda for the balance of the year with planning activities, major issues around Wellington wastewater, and managing tourism through the summer.”

“I think we probably did as much as a council in 2020 as could be expected, along with all of the anomalies that the virus brought us.” One of the things that Hirsch did in the early stages of the pandemic was to reach out to local residents via email to find out what they were concerned about. “People were confused about what the rules were, what the virus was all about and how to tell fact from fiction. People were really frightened and uncertain.” He ended up sending a daily message with COVID statistics for the region, as well as a list of curated news stories. From an initial list of 35 people, there are now 165 addresses on his email, and recipients do not hesitate to provide feedback or to alert Hirsch of their ongoing concerns. For 2021, Hirsch will continue to focus on how planned or potential development affects the County’s environment. “There’s an influx of proposals for major projects that have potential impact on the environment that have kept me occupied in 2020 and continue to be the case in 2021,” he says. “We have major planning projects like the IRTH development, the Sandy Hook Warings Creek development, Quinte’s Isle Campark and major development planned in Wellington.”

Mayor Ferguson says that a significant focus for him was the well-being of County residents. “People had complicated emotions of anger, frustrations, worry and loss of contact with family members because of the request by the Province not to travel. So it’s taken a pretty significant toll emotionally, financially and spiritually,” he says. “Given the situation with job loss or job deferral, we made it a little easier for residents to defer taxes, and we forgave interest on overdue payments. Also recognizing that the municipality is one of the largest employers in the County, we maintained full employment; we didn’t lay anybody off.” For 2021, Ferguson has a number of priorities. “The Official Plan is coming forward. We are going to be hearing about the tourism management plan, and that’s going to involve input and contributions from the Province, insomuch as they need to deal with how Sandbanks is managed. We have made changes to our planning department, making the planning process more predictable. It will help our developers as well as help our staff.” In addition, McFarland Home will be redeveloped, and the municipality will continue to support the new hospital build. There will be more money committed to roads revitalization, as well as improving broadband Internet access across the County.

Ferguson remains optimistic about the prospects for 2021. “There is considerable hope for the vaccines that are slowly trickling in. In the meantime, we are still dealing with a very serious health situation that requires everyone to maintain current health protocols. I do want to commend our residents and our businesses, municipal staff and councillors for all the work that’s been done to protect our community and ensure its continuous operation through this extremely difficult time. We are going to get through this. We’ve done a fabulous job so far, so let’s keep up with the health protocols and get out there and support our local businesses as much as we can and we will weather this storm.”

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, there was no Mayor’s Levee this year. Instead, Mayor Ferguson has provided a video address on Facebook at facebook.com/PrinceEdwardCounty