The Industrial Park upkeep drew some criticism at the most recent Village of Burns Lake council meeting.
At the Sept. 16 meeting industrial park business owner Kathy Waters approached council to voice her displeasure with the current state of the park. Waters said at council that the park has a rundown welcome sign that is in need of repair and an incoming road that is clogged with potholes during the winter months.
Waters said she has a heavy duty mechanics shop in the industrial park and is planning on opening a small car lot as well. She said the beautification projects village staff have completed in Burns Lake are great, but the park is an important sector of the village and needs to garner some attention as well.
A few days later Burns Lake Mayor Luke Strimbold said council has added possible improvements to the industrial park sign and roadway to their 2015 budget conversation. He said village staff and affected business operators now need to sit down and have a discussion about what needs to be done to make the park more successful.
Strimbold said the process to make changes to the park is interesting considering the sign is on Ministry of Transportation land, the structure of the sign belongs to the village and they are in charge of maintaining or upgrading it and then the individual businesses are responsible for putting their own advertising on the structure. He said the upkeep of Roumieu Drive, the roadway leading into the park, is solely village responsibility.
"When we did the re-pavement through Burns Lake, the downtown revitalization, we actually took the old asphalt and reused it," said Strimbold. "We put it on resurfacing Roumieu Drive, a portion of Roumieu Drive, because of the condition it was in…so that's where we've seen a reduction in potholes and of course we want to keep it maintained."
Strimbold said council is committed to having a conversation during the budget process about determining the best moves available to promote business investment and to maintain businesses in this community. He said they will look at what some of the ideas are around industrial development and industrial business, but nothing can be done financially to improve the current situation until the next year.
"We've allocated our budget entirely for 2014," he said. "If something was to take place it would [be] in the 2015 fiscal year."