Dauphin city councillors are back from the fall Association of Manitoba Municipalities convention in Brandon and, as always, the event was well worth the hotel bill, mayor David Bosiak said.
In particular, the Cities Caucus meeting gave Bosiak some perspective on how stable things are in Dauphin compared to some municipalities, which are struggling to fund proper infrastructure and services resulting from rapid growth and skyrocketing costs.
As an example, Bosiak pointed to Winkler, where a new sewage treatment facility is critical and comes with a price tag of $51 million. Or Steinbach, he said, where a new community centre and arena is being developed at a cost exceeding $71 million.
“That’s 10 times what we paid for our rec complex,” he said. “If we had to replace Credit Union Place, are you kidding me? We’d never be able to do it.”
The lesson is that Dauphin’s problems and concerns are all relative and the community can handle them.
“I have to give past councils and administration credit for building up our reserves so that now we are debenturing two big projects - the sewage lagoon and the South Main drainage, but we have an ability to do so because we have no debt and we have reserves,” Bosiak said. “We can talk about comparatives all over the place, but we’re in relatively decent shape.”
The convention also provided an opportunity for councillors to meet with officials from the provincial level and have a productive meeting RCMP D Division commanders.
“They indicated to us that we are one of the only municipalities that talked to them that didn’t complain to them about needing more police,” Bosiak said. “We’d love to have some more, like a full compliment, but we understand, as a community, that the challenges we face aren’t going to be solved just by policing. The RCMP said what we’re doing in the community has been very positive and they’re glad to be working with us. And glad that we indicated that we’d love them to be a full compliment, but we didn’t point our finger at them and blame them for it.”
That meeting meshed well with a meeting involving deputy minister from Manitoba Housing, Mental Health and Addictions about an internally-driven Manitoba Housing project under way in Dauphin, which is looking at provided a higher level of tiered support services for those needing them, at Parkview Lodge.
“That was a positive meeting,” Bosiak said. “We’re very hopeful that there’ll be some support from the Province for the proposal that’s been presented to Manitoba Housing.”
A meeting was also held with Sport, Culture and Heritage minister Glen Simard about potential provincial support for next year’s Manitoba Summer Games.
When taken as whole, Bosiak said the convention was a worthwhile endeavour.
“We had very positive meetings with all of the ministers and offices that we were engaged with, had good conversations with other communities and basically, in a very subtle way, compared ourselves to everyone else,” he said. “And you know, putting it all on the table, the strength of our council, the capacity of our administration, the fact that our taxes are reasonable . . . generally speaking, really we’re in pretty good shape.”
