Pellerin fears losing doctor and other community services
Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
Municipal council is making some important decisions regarding its many physical properties, reviewing what needs fixing, what could be sold off, and what remains viable into the future. Currently, a public tender is up for the sale of 30 Front Street, occupied by the Information Centre, in Sturgeon Falls. The building was deemed underutilized by the municipality, and so council moved to sell the property rather than continue to pour funds into maintaining it. A similar decision is now on council’s plate when it comes to the Verner municipal building, which needs some major repairs. However, this has raised some concerns from residents, who fear a loss in services will result should that building also be sold off. Council has options, which were presented at a meeting back in January, but they have yet to make a final decision.
“There are building condition assessment reports on all of our buildings, and everything is in bad shape. At some point, whether it’s this council or the next council, to be forward thinking we have to start thinking strategically about which buildings serve the needs of the community, which buildings are used, because we cannot afford to keep everything we have,” declares West Nipissing mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon, when asked about the review.
Many properties were taken over by the municipality during amalgamation in 1999, and in most cases, the decision to keep or cut them simply didn’t get made by previous councils. As the mayor points out, selling a community asset is often an unpopular decision, but she assures that this council has tried to be more decisive regardless of backlash.
That backlash often comes from residents who don’t want to lose buildings and services in their immediate area. However, there are also people pleased to see the municipality selling off what they perceive as tax waste. “It really is the 8,000 people in Sturgeon Falls, who are subsidizing all of the road maintenance, and everything else that we have to provide over 2,000 square kilometres,” states the mayor. To put it into perspective, she explains that if the entire population of West Nipissing was squeezed into only the geographic area of Sturgeon Falls, “you’d have only 2 fire stations, only one dump. We have 7 dumps and 8 fire stations. We have 535 km of road that we manage.”
