Central Huron Mayor Says Recent Facilities Report Was Good News
by Bob Montgomery
Central Huron Mayor Jim Ginn says the Facilities Report was part of Monday’s Central Huron Strategic Planning Meeting.
They conduct the strategic planning meeting every ten years and it involves checking out all of the buildings the municipality owns and determining what needs to be done to interiors, exteriors, plumbing and electrical and generally their facilities are in pretty good shape. He says the building they've done recently, like the fire hall and the arena, have several years of life left in them, but all of the report has to be turned in with their asset management plan that has to be presented to the province.
The goal of the province is to starting funding municipalities based on their needs rather than give every municipality a blanket amount. He points out that forty years ago, a small municipality with 2,000 people could get a sewage treatment plant that the province would fund 85% of the cost, that isn't available today and a cost of fixing the sewage treatment plant at $15 million isn't going to work. Ginn says another situation is small towns that are on the edge of cities like London or Kitchener-Waterloo. Those towns probably don't have recreation facilities like arena's, they just go to the larger cities so they don't need the funding that some other municipalities do.
Ginn says under the asset management plan, they have to show the government what their facilities are like, what their lifespan might be, what costs are likely to be involved and are they putting enough money away to cover those costs and then the province will base their funding on that. Funding aside, Ginn says it just makes good practice to bring in a different set of eyes to look at things like the five different halls that they have in Central Huron that are in varying needs of repair. He says the hall in Holmesville seems to be in good shape, but it is forty years old so it's going to need some attention soon. Ginn shares that, generally speaking, they are in good shape.
