Mayor Cal Huntley is asking Flin Flonners to share their municipal priorities as the city braces for potentially difficult spending choices in the future.
While he repeatedly used the word “may” – not “will” – to describe decisions around possible service reductions, the mayor served notice that changes could be in the offing.
“It’s challenging times money-wise, and facilities-wise there’s a cost,” Huntley said. “We have an aging pool, we have a Whitney Forum that’s heavily subsidized, we have a curling club we just met with that are looking for various methods to continue funding [because] they’re finding it challenging with the lack of participation. It’s the general environment right now and how it’s changing, and how we get input from the community [will inform] the decisions and they may be tough decisions that we make.”
Huntley said the “challenges going forward” won’t come tomorrow, but council wants to at least plant a seed around gleaning “proper [public] engagement and communication other than Flin Flon Post It,” a community Facebook page.
“I know the ultimate decision is ours, but participation is going to be required and we don’t want anybody on the sidelines,” he said. “We want them to be part of the solution, whatever that might be. So we’ll be looking at different ways to try and involve the community in some of the tougher decisions that we, at the end of the day, may have to make.”
Asked about specific matters up for discussion, Huntley gave no specific examples but did say there is “a multitude of issues.”
“As the scope of the issues [comes] to light, we want to have a mechanism to say, ‘Alright, it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but if we don’t do something different in the next couple of years, we may lose this service,’” he said. “Rather than just lose the service, we’d like to have a little input around it. There’s a lot of people out there that are smarter than we are that may have better ideas than we have, and we’d like to hear from them.”
Later, after Coun. Leslie Beck spoke on the need for municipal facilities to generate income, Huntley said all communities subsidize certain services.
“It’s just making sure you’re subsidizing the services your community, or the greater part of your community and region, want to support, and that will be the challenge,” the mayor added.
Coun. Colleen McKee pondered how the city might glean the input it wants.
“We’ve tried surveys, and surveys bring us very, very limited success,” she said. “We need something that…people are going to respond to, so…if you have an idea, please feel free to bring it to myself or any member of council and we will do our best to try to get some public feedback as to what people feel and deem as important.
“We really need to know this kind of stuff in order to make good decisions.”
Beck offered context around the volume of sponsorship requests the city receives.
“I for one have only been on this council this first year and the amount of times that we have to try and address people who want the Community Hall for nothing and then they want Pioneer Square and then they want the curling [rink],” she said. “If they don’t pay us, who pays for the janitor? Who pays for all this stuff? And people have to understand...it needs to generate income in order to succeed, and we can’t always be giving it away for free.”
