The Tissue Issue

I get a lot of snickers when I mention this problem faced by our municipality.  Beiseker, along with quite a number of other municipalities have to deal with this problem on an ongoing basis.

It is the tissue issue!  Many municipalities must pump sanitary sewage to its treatment site or lagoon.  This requires the use of large and expensive pumps.

Beiseker's sewage pumps are located in a building behind the seed cleaning plant.  Those pumps send the sewage to our lagoon system on the east side of Highway #9.

Bathroom tissue, toilet tissue, or toilet paper is designed to disintegrate or bio-degrade almost immediately after it's flushed.  Facial tissue; not so much!  Flushing facial tissue can be very harmful to those large pumps!

Pumps must be constantly cleaned and overhauled, partly due to the fact that they get jammed up with facial tissue.  This process costs Beiseker thousands of dollars each year!  No, really!

When people ask what they can do to help the village save money, one way I suggest is to remember that toilet paper is for flushing and facial tissue is for throwing in the garbage!

(Did I make you snicker?)

Streets, Lagoons, the new Firehall, and Taxes!

We had an excellent council meeting last evening (Monday, June 11). 

First of all, I was able to give Public Works Foreman Bill Hnybida and his crew the praise they deserve for getting the Village all ship shape for last weekend's Country Fair.  I also thanked Gail Peckham for all of her hard work getting things organized here at the office Saturday morning.

We discussed your concerns with the street cleaning project.  Council and Bill agreed to investigate the situation and find solutions for next year's street cleaning project. 

We were also very concerned with the Chinook Crescent paving project, which seems to have stalled again. I have no idea why this project is taking so long.   We asked our own engineers to find out why these crew keep vanishing.  Maybe the paving crews are getting lost following their GPS to Beiseker!  We also asked our engineers to remind these wayward crews that the completion date is fast approaching!

Next came the sewage lagoon.  The lagoon needs upgrading to meet new environmental standards.  This will be started over the next while. 

The new firehall appears closer to reality now.  Critical decisions are to be made this week and the project is to proceed quickly after that.  We should have a new firehall within about two months after that.  Stay tuned on this one.

Last and certainly not least, we set  the tax rate for 2012.  As I mentioned before, our overall assessment dropped by more than $3 million, but the cost of running the village either remained the same or increased.  Our Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) worked over the budgets for every Village department and brought a proposed final 2012 budget to us last night, which we accepted. 

We then set our millrate with a 4.5% increase.  Add to that the 1% the School Boards want and the total increase will be 5.5%.  It is based on your assessment, so some of you will notice an increase while others who were assessed at a lower amount may notice a small decrease. 

Overall, I was very proud of our CAO and Village Council for keeping the village portion of the increase to less than 5%.  I hope you all will not notice any drastic changes in the delivery of services around the village over the next twelve months. 

Your tax notices will be coming out over the next few days.  Check them over and let me know if you have any concerns.