New Lake Cowichan Mayor Bob Day said the Town of Lake Cowichan’s council hasn’t had a chance to sit down and talk about how to use their $1.158 million grant from the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing.
The money, allocated under the COVID-19 safe restart grants for local governments, hasn’t been deposited into the town’s coffers yet.
“We just got the announcement at the last finance meeting so we haven’t sat down and discussed it yet but we will at the Dec. 8 meeting. That’ll give councillors some time to think about it,” Day said.
In the meantime residents looking to communicate with town officials will note some changes due to the increased restrictions once again put in place by the provincial health officer due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The reason I ran for mayor is I thought we were a little behind but we are only a small town and we don’t have as much commercial as other centres to help us carry the load of doing all of the wonderful things that seem to be first off the hop in doing,” Day said. “One of the things that has changed is we had our first virtual meeting this past week. It’d been talked about and talked about and with a little bit of pushing, it came about.”
The front doors of the town office are locked.
“You can only enter by knocking or by phoning and making an appointment,” Day added. “Council has moved right away from going to council chambers — to set an example of not putting staff in an unsafe position. They have to deal with enough every day with the public coming through the door.”
Day said he’s in daily contact with the town’s chief administrative officer about the possibility of stopping the public from entering the building at all. It hasn’t come to that.
“We’re comfortable with the way things are now and we’ll wait until the next updates and make decisions from there.”
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