At the regular Rocanville town council meeting on Wednesday, the council received a letter informing them how much they’ll receive in funding as part of the Safe Restart Program (SRP). Rocanville received $51,481 in funding from the SRP.
SRP is a federal investment of more than $19 billion to help provinces and territories safely restart their economics and help Canada in its recovery from Covid-19 and a potential future surge in cases.
“I asked them if we don’t spend the funding on programs to do with Covid-19, will they ask for it back, but I’ve been assured it’s free money to spend where we’d like,” said Administrator Monica Pethick.
Under the municipal and transit stream, the program provides $70.323 million in incremental federal funding for municipalities. $62.257 million in general municipal support will be allocated to municipalities on a per capita basis.
Second ICIP application
The Town of Rocanville will be submitting an application for the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP). The governments of Canada and Saskatchewan signed a bilateral agreement in October 2018 to launch ICIP.
“ICIP came out months ago,” said Administrator Monica Pethick. “We first applied for a new pool, but we didn’t get accepted on that one. There’s now a second allocation with the government launching a new application intake for two funding streams. We’ll be applying to the retrofits, repairs and upgrades category. The application is due October 30.”
The ICIP application streams currently open are the Covid-19 Resilience Infrastructure Stream (CVRIS) and the Green Stream—funding for the decommissioning of landfills. Both applications opened September 18.
The goal of ICIP is to help Saskatchewan residents through creating a cleaner environment, increasing capacity for disaster mitigation, improving drinking water, enhancing facilities, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving travel times, and providing better transportation and digital infrastructure for people in remote communities.
Eligible ICIP project candidates must be located in Saskatchewan and start before September 30, 2021 and be completed no later than December 31, 2021 with a minimum of $100,000 in total eligible costs to a maximum of $10 million.
Dentist and doctors office schedule
With the Covid-19 pandemic increasing the need to lessen interactions and ensure physical distancing, the dentist and doctors office building will be on a rotating schedule.
The dentist will be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays while the doctor is in Mondays and Wednesdays, and they’ll alternate on Fridays.
“We’ve laid some ground rules that we can’t have the dentist and doctor there at the same time because we can’t have that many people in the office at one time,” said Administrator Monica Pethick. “We don’t want anybody in the waiting room while the doctor is at the front desk discussing things with patients so we’ve put together a schedule.”
AFAB-600 grid ditch
The council discussed a plan to clean the ditch a mile north of town that’s causing drainage problems.
“There’s a half mile section between the 600 grid corner and AFAB’s corner of their land that’s Highways’ ditch that’s not maintained,” said Administrator Monica Pethick.
“We’ve requested several times to have it dealt with and all they’ve done is dug out in front of the culverts, which is no help to us. We got Rhino (Dirtworks) to shoot some levels there and the ditch is seven inches higher than everything else in the center.
“We’ve really got to clean that ditch out in order to get rid of some of the water in town.
“Highways doesn’t have the money and we’re closing a waterline loop out on the highway next year—the stop ends on the highway—and there’s another stop end partway in on Fort Street.
“What we’re going to do is join the two together so we don’t have two stop ends and when we do this we have to lay a base coat of blacktop down straight away,” she said. “So I’ve done a verbal deal that we don’t have to lay a base coat down in lieu of the money we’re spending to clean the highway ditch.
“We can’t wait until next year when Highways is here to deal with it just in case, so this is the plan. If we got seven inches of water flowing it’s going to make a mess in town so we want to deal with it now. We have the permits in place to do it.”
