The District of Elkford’s mayor feels the community has made significant progress through 2019, from its new offices to infrastructure improvements.
2019 saw the completion of Elkford’s new municipal building and Mayor Dean Mckerracher said he is pleased with how it tuned out.
“We moved into our new district office in April. It’s a beautiful building, brand new, lots of daylight. On the energy scale for commercial buildings, we are at the top of the scale. We have solar as well, so we can feed the building directly during the daylight. It’s a very successful building, we’re pleased to be in it. It came in under budget, too at $2.5 million,” said Mckerracher.
Complimenting the new building is a set of three new management staff members:Â a new CAO, Director of Lesure Services, and Manager of Planning and Development.
“They’ve only been in place about four to five weeks, so they’re learning their jobs and learning about the projects in the past and of course they’ve run into strategic planning and budgets for next year. They’ve gotten their feet wet right away,” said Mckerracher.
According to Mckerracher, the municipal speed limit reduction from 50 to 40 km/h has also been counted as a success for the community.
“The speed limit change was requested by quite a few citizens in the community, and we as a council have concerns with safety and the speeds that people are driving. I’ve already seen a big change in the speeds and I’m very pleased with it,” Mckerracher said to MyEastKootenayNow.com.
Council also approved measures to make roadside parking tickets during snow removal season more costly, bumping it up from $35 to $50
More: Elkford reducing Municipal Speed Limit (November 19, 2019)
More: Elkford increases Cost of Parking Tickets (November 26, 2019)
Adding to road changes, the District has completed around $2.4 million in repaving projects in its downtown area, with more to come in 2020.
“In Middletown, major road repairs need to be done, and we need infrastructure underground, but we can’t get grant money from the feds or the province for our infrastructure on that section. We applied and were told ‘no,’ so we’re going to have to borrow money to do that project,” said Mckerracher. “We’re hoping the citizens will allow us to borrow that money, a little over $4 million to do Middletown paving.”
Mckerracher added that more infrastructure improvements are planned for 2021 as well.
Mayor Mckerracher concluded saying that 2019 was a productive and successful year for the District of Elkford.