By Chad Ingram

Haliburton County’s four lower-tier municipalities will continue to deal with recovery from the COVID-19 crisis separately county councillorsdecided during a June 10 special meeting.

While there had been somethought given to collective messaging earlier in the ongoing pandemicthe four municipalities have been taking their own approaches tooperations and now with the phased re-opening of Ontario’s economyrecovery planning.
Given that there has been a regional re-openingof some businesses by the provincial government Warden Liz Danielsenasked her colleagues if they saw any benefit to a countywide approach“or if you think it’s more productive to continue on an individualmunicipal basis.”

“I would say stay the course” said Minden HillsMayor Brent Devolin. “After this crisis I think there’ll be lots ofconversations if we want to use a different framework or how we dothat in the future but in the middle of the game I’d say we missedthat opportunity a couple of months ago and I’m prepared to live withthe status quo for the balance of this.”

Dysart et al Mayor AndreaRoberts agreed. Dysart et al is the first of the four municipalities tohave struck a COVID-19 recovery committee which was meeting for thesecond time last week.
“I don’t think we missed any boat oranything” Roberts said. “Each municipality wants to do something tohelp their communities and I think that if there’s an opportunitythrough our committee where we see this is really a county issue let’s work collectively then we can bring that forward to council.”

County council consists of the mayors and deputy mayors of each of the fourmunicipalities. The county is currently having a service delivery review of itself and the four lower tiers conducted by Toronto-basedconsulting firm StrategyCorp.