This month’s RM of Rosedale Council meeting starts on a less than ideal note. The Council had reached out to Evergreen Environmental Services to join the partnership in the facility, which currently includes the Town of Neepawa and RM of North Cypress-Langford. Unfortunately, the facility indicated they were already seeing higher than anticipated volumes of waste to process and declined the request at this time. These types of partnerships are critical because a facility like Evergreen, which includes a gasification unit, is cost prohibitive for any one municipality to run on its own.

However, a more successful partnership is the planning district, which Rosedale is a part of along with the Town of Neepawa and Municipality of Glenella-Lansdowne. This month we see some routine public hearings for subdivisions and variances on pieces of land, but also some concern about dilapidated properties. There are bylaws in place to address notice to landowners for properties cleanup, but the municipality is considering whether they might need a legal opinion on when they can or should step in beyond that.

Council receives several requests for funding, and often these come from within the Town of Neepawa and not the RM itself. This month it sees two, one from the Yellowhead Recreation Centre and another for a fundraiser for Ukraine from a Neepawa school. Residents of the RM are frequent users of these facilities, and while Council discusses the merits of each request they ultimately recognise that in supporting these facilities and projects, they are supporting their own people.

Equipment purchases and repairs are a perennial agenda item for the municipality. This month they look at general operations equipment including consumables such as lumber, the purchase of a new mower, the lease of a new grader, an extension for the water line, and additional fire department equipment. On top of that, they continue to keep an eye out for a used fire truck that fits their limited budget.

Council also passed the third reading of the property tax bylaw and reviewed the changes the municipality will see including the new mill rate.