Quesnel City Council has adopted it’s 2018 Strategic Plan.
City Manager Byron Johnson went over some of the highlights at last night’s meeting…
“Continue to work with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure as the highway safety project moves into an action phase and lobby for long term improvements such as the connector route. That one is modified from last time when we hadn’t come to a conclusion as to what connector route was preferred, so this says we want to push it to the next phase and keep pushing on this issue.”
Other plans include developing the next steps for the West Quesnel Land Stability area, continue to develop an age friendly plan for Quesnel and multi-use trail development to drive tourism.
Economic development projects include a First Nations Cultural Centre as part of waterfront development, to support the agriculture sector through the development of the business case for the Agriculture Centre and the food innovation hub, and upgrade the arena precinct to improve event hosting capacity.
One initiative that is well underway but is also part of the 2018 plan is the redevelopment of the 200, 300 and 400 blocks of Reid Street as well as the one and two hundred blocks of Barlow Avenue.
The landfill and recycling were also part of the plan, specifically to complete the strategic review of landfilling and recycling practices, something Johnson says is already out for RFP at this time.
Mayor Bob Simpson cautioned Council that this could become a contentious issue….
“If you’ve been paying attention to the news it is getting more and more difficult to find buyers for the collective recycling materials because they are becoming much more stringent on any corruption of the materials of things that shouldn’t be in there, particularly plastic bags. So from the technical side of things it’s getting much more difficult and more stringent application of the actual recycling rules that we’ve got needs to be applied. That may mean, and i want to put it out there right away, we may need to really look hard at the satellite stations because too many people use them as garbage dumps.”
Simpson says adding to that is that Municipalities are going to be under increasing pressure to go to zero waste initiatives, adding that more and more communities are looking at banning straws and single use plastics etc.
The Strategic Plan was reviewed over the winter and last night’s vote was unanimous.