Mayor of Redvers says town is moving in the right direction
January 4, 2023, 3:07 pm
Sierra D'Souza Butts, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Mayor of Redvers, Brad Bullbuck, said the town and staff have been working hard in organizing projects and applying for grants to help the town grow in population, along with strengthening its economic development.
What were some of the highlights and achievements for the town this year?
This was a busy year, and a real transition year for us. We’ve had numerous discussions with our water security people, and it was absolutely inevitable that we had to do some water treatment upgrades.
Part of that process involved sending a utility survey to all the residents just to get some feedback of what their costs were. We’ve started the process for upgrades, the first phase is almost complete right now.
The ICIP grant application has already been submitted. There have been numerous conversations with water security and our engineer, which is BCL Engineering. We have a plan in place to move forward with the water treatment plant. The project grant we applied for would be $6.7 million, our portion of the costs is about 24 per cent, which is $1.6 million.
We’re still waiting to hear from the ICIP grant. Once we hear on that we will divide the plan for start dates, things like that.
With our plan for the water treatment upgrade, we found out that a lot of our old wells were not decommissioned properly. We have now gone through the decommissioning process with the province and have to do the final paperwork to finish our applications for the grants, to pay for that decommissioning.
Because of everything that’s been happening in the office, we hired a full-time secretary which is a fourth position in the office.
We’ve done a full re-write of our OH&S policy manual. We’ve replaced the transit bus lift that wasn’t working. We’ve put in four new handicap accessible parking spots.
We joined the South East Transportation Planning Committee with respect to providing input on which roads need upgrading and repairs in our area. We put a semi-permanent loT promotion in place with proper signage for the sale of the new lots on the south end of town.
We have purchased two new Automated External Defibrillators (AED) for the town. One is in the town office and one is with the town fire department. The rink already has one, but we felt for the safety of our staff and fire staff, we needed to add a defibrillator as well.
We’ve totally re-written our fire plan and our emergency response plan for the town. We have taken official ownership of the cenotaph over from the Redvers homemakers club.
We joined the Feral Friends Program for any stray cats or dogs in the community. We have enhanced our memory pot program to recognize family members that have passed away. Family members can pay for the planting of the pot and it’s displayed around town with recognition of their loved ones.
Two of our staff members now have the commercial pesticide applicator certification.
We were a partner with many municipalities in getting a concrete landing path out at our fire hall for STARS Air Ambulance to land.
There are two new commercial businesses starting construction in town right now. We have five new, and expanding businesses in town.
We changed our bylaw officer program. We used to pay the commissionaries to do it, but we felt because we were doing most of the work, we internalized that and our staff is taking control of that now. We continue to do custom street sweeping.
In partnership with the South East Medical Group and Redvers Health Foundation, we hired another doctor through the SIPPA program, Dr. Mehdi Shadmani.
Both groups were also successful in reopening emergency services in the spring of this year, after the Saskatchewan Health Authority had it closed for about six months. Those groups worked very hard to get the ER reopened.
We had another successful Rockin’ the Block, as well another successful Redvers Health Fundraiser and another successful Wildlife fundraiser.
The Lions Club did a winter coat and food drive. Tourism put on a July 1 parade and fireworks.
We also changed our branding. The old logo was sort of the province of Saskatchewan with the picture of a pump jack and a cow, then a star with where Redvers is located. That was sort of a 90s style logo and incorporated the economic drive within the area.
At the time it was suitable, but we changed it now to say the Town of Redvers. It’s in stylized writing and it’s very up to date. Rather than hiring a consulting company and paying them $10,000 to design a logo, our administrative team did it on their own.
In regards to our town staff, we’re not the same office we used to be. We’re taking a more proactive role in regards to grants, and opportunities, as well as business development within our office.
Rather than having a dedicated economic development officer, we have given our staff more opportunities to do economic development activities, part of that involves grant writing.
We’ve applied for the Saskatchewan Seniors Mechanism grant for $20,000. We’ve applied for a Kingston Midstream Saskatchewan Limited grant for digital signs. We also put a program in place where we’re soliciting donations for digital signs and we’re offering donation packages to businesses.
We’ve applied for a New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP) grant, we applied for the ICIP grant for the water treatment plant. We’ve applied for a SGI grant which is to put a light control crosswalk, going across Highway 13 to the school ground, to the Triple LB Food & Gas station. As well we applied for the well decommissioning grant.
It’s been an extremely challenging year for council and staff, but it’s been a very rewarding year in the fact that we have implemented, I would say, 100 per cent of the projects and initiatives that we had identified at the beginning of the year.
We either started those or completed them, and we’re not done yet. We have also had preliminary discussions with a hotel developer. There will be more coming out on that in the new year.
Was there anything council did not succeed in this year that you’re hoping to accomplish in 2023?
We have identified a number of grants that are available to either municipal entities or recreation entities, or education entities.
We’re trying to get an active gatekeeper with respect to these grants, and bring awareness to other organizations in the community about what’s available. There are a ton of grants out there.
What were some of the challenges the town faced this year?
We’re looking for opportunities for all types of businesses, we’re looking for opportunities to improve the health and wealth of our community.
We’re looking for opportunities to improve Redvers as a destination for people to come here, and as a place to live.
That connects to operating the water plant. If you don’t have good water it’s hard to get people to move here. If you don’t have good recreation it’s hard to get people to move here.
If you don’t have a hospital it’s hard to get people to move here. If you don’t have a good education program, then it’s hard to get people to move here.
We have all of those things right now, but we don’t want to be complacent because if you’re complacent, then you actually fall behind other communities.
How does this year compare to last year?
In Fall of 2020 we had an election, so in 2021 we had five new councillors out of the seven.
With the five new councillors, year one, under this current administration I would say, was sort of a learning curve for all of council.
We spent a lot of time bringing people up to speed about where we were at with certain things, and brainstormed around what we wanted to do for 2022.
After council had a year under their belt, we felt it was a time to move forward with some of these projects that we sort of put on hold for a year.
I think that’s why there was so much emphasis in 2022 for getting a lot of this stuff done.
Five to ten years from now, what do you expect for the Town of Redvers?
That would be letting the cat out of the bag.
But, we would like to invest more money into recreation. There is some development we would like to do there.
One thing we did this year, we hosted the U13 AA Provincial Boys Baseball, and the Girls Regional Softball playoffs this year. Those events, if you do the math on them, if you host two of those events a year and you bring 10 teams to town, you’re bringing roughly 100 families to town.
If those families spend $500 in town, they’re spending $50,000 in town. If you host two of those events, they’re spending $100,000 in town.
That’s really important to our businesses in town. We need those people to continue to come to town, and we want to grow that market.
When I say invest into recreation, there’s obviously things we can do to improve our facilities. It’s important to know that once you improve your facilities, the governing bodies of these athletic committees are more inclined to let you host those events.
I think from the two events we hosted this year, the organizing committees did one hell of a job, and we received a lot of recognition for it from other communities. That’s an area we want to take advantage of in the summer time.
The other thing that’s happened here recently, is the golf course purchased two community golf simulators. That’s providing a mechanism to keep the money in the community.
The Winter Fest Committee this year, had an idea of putting an outdoor rink at the tennis court which I thought was very good. I think that’s something we’re probably going to continue to do.
“Five to ten years from now we also plan to do our planning based on our infrastructure and matching it with our amenities, recreation, health care and economic development. To focus on everything coming together and not just on one area, but to have our priorities and asset management plan focused on our community as a whole,” added CAO Tricia Pickard.
Tricia, our CAO, when she applied for the ICIP grant, her and her team totally redid our asset management plan. In that asset management plan, they identified where we need to spend money in the next three, five, ten, and 25 years from now.
Now, we have a plan moving forward that when we’re budgeting year to year, it’s not dealing with things that are just popping up and managing by situation. We’re putting a proactive plan in place where we can manage and anticipate where we’re going to have to spend money, before we’re forced to spend the money and may not have the ability to.
We want to keep living here affordable. Council does not want to raise taxes if we can get away with it. We are looking for ways to either reduce our expenses or improve our revenues through user paid function, instead of everyone splitting the bill for certain things.
Credit card providers are allowing businesses to now start charging the fees on credit card payments. Our cost on most credit card fees are about $30,000 a year.
Rather than pass that cost to all tax payers, we’re saying we’re going to give them four options to pay their bills. They can pay by cheque, they can pay by debit card, you can pay by cash, or you can pay by credit card. If you pay by credit card though, you’ll be subject to a fee. That itself, could save us $30,000 a year in expenses.
I want to thank the residents for their understanding in respect to the water treatment plant and the challenges we have around that.
As well, thank you to the residents who continue to support our community.
The town would like to thank all of the committees that were involved in all the successful fundraising events and everything else that happened throughout the year.
We can’t look after all of them, but it’s through these people who step up and help that make these events successful.
As well, the Southeast Medical Group. We sort of got over all the hiccups with healthcare right now and things seem to be operating pretty good.
We have volunteers putting between 20 to 30 hours a week on those boards. That’s volunteer time, they’re making commitment over and above the family time they want to spend, and their down time from their work, and those are unpaid positions. We really can’t thank them enough because that is a thankless job.
“It’s also important to mention that all the fundraisers and initiatives that happened were because of people stepping up and volunteering,”added CAO Tricia Pickard.
“The town may have not had a hand in that, but it’s important to mention there’s a lot of great community committees that put things on.
“The boards and committees are so important, our rec board, our fire department, our tourism, our health board, our library board. They may not put on big events, but they are instrumental.”
