At the June 11 meeting of Flin Flon city council, councillors paid tribute to Jim Conner, a former Flin Flon mayor who recently passed away.
Jim Conner served as Flin Flon’s mayor from 1969 to 1970. Conner died June 10 in Morden at the age of 92.
“We just want to pass along our condolences to his family. He will be missed. He was quite a gentleman and he was a real asset to the community for many, many years,” said Mayor Cal Huntley.
“He was just a real, real gentleman. An outstanding gentleman.”
FCM conference
Councillor Karen MacKinnon read a report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) conference held in Quebec City May 30 to June 2.
MacKinnon attended the conference, along with councillors Colleen Arnold and Colleen McKee, taking part in several subcommittees and workshops with other councillors from across Canada.
“Whether it’s better roads, transit, housing or water systems, local governments are building better lives. We made the most of the workshops and tools available,” said MacKinnon.
One of the workshops discussing illicit drug use stuck out for MacKinnon.
“That was a very emotional one. Right across Canada, every community in Canada is dealing with the drug crisis,” MacKinnon said. “One of the speakers at the workshop was a police officer for 33 years. He said he’d never, ever seen anything like this.”
MacKinnon said one way to tackle a community drug problem was to address and discuss concerns with residents.
“It’s not something that we should be ignoring,” she said.
Drugs
Mayor Huntley did not attend the meeting, but did discuss drug concerns closer to home using information from MacKinnon’s report.
“One of the things when we talked about the crystal meth and all that kind of stuff is that people don’t know. We were a community apparently where, because of the dollars here, cocaine was more prevalent than the cheaper drugs,” he said. “What you don’t know now is, when you’re buying coke, you may not be getting all coke. They’re finding that [additives are] being used to cut everything from pot to cocaine and different things like that. Given the addictive side to it, it really is scary.”
When asked if he considered drugs to be a problem in Flin Flon, Huntley agreed.
“Absolutely it is. If needle usage is any indication, there’s some significant amounts of drugs being used in the community,” he said.
AMM advice
Council approved a number of recommendations for the Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) at the June 11 meeting. Councillors aimed to use the recommendations to lobby the provincial government on a number of key issues.
The issues approved to bring forward included measures to provide Manitoba municipalities 25 per cent of net revenues of cannabis excise taxes; the restoration of the development business loans program for Northern businesses through the Communities Economic Development Fund (CEDF); to index annual Municipal Assistance Grants; to review the existing model of distributing income from VLT distribution and provide more of the income to municipalities; and create three separate amendments to the provincial Mining Tax Act.
The first change desired by the city council is increasing the percentage of mining tax allocated to the Mining Community Reserve Fund (MCRF), an emergency fund maintained by the Manitoba government to assist mining towns in financially lean times.
Also approved by the council were measures to promote economic diversification for mining communities and to disallow funding from the MCRF to be distributed to other provincial general reserves.
The recommendations were set for further discussion at the AMM regional meeting in Flin Flon June 20.
Funding announcements
The City of Flin Flon announced funding for two community projects.
Phantom Lake Golf Course received $3000 from the city to cover some expenses for accessibility repairs on the site.
Another agreement was reached to split costs for the Flin Flon Neighbourhood Revitalization Corporation (FFNRC)’s Main Street flower project, with the FFNRC, the city and Hudbay each covering a third of the $4,400 cost.
