North Battleford's planning committee approves updated pandemic plan (file photo/battlefordsNOW staff)

By Keaton Brown

updating plans

North Battleford planning committee approves updated pandemic plan

Apr 21, 2020 | 2:00 PM

As an effort to stay in front of the COVID-19 situation, North Battleford’s planning committee vetted and approved an updated pandemic plan.

“We have been working on this for a while. It is a joint plan between Battleford and North Battleford,” North Battleford Mayor Ryan Bater said. “It is very comprehensive.”

This updated policy is just the next step in the extensive COVID-19 preparedness plan. Bater said they have been working and updating their strategy starting all the way back in January.

“The city had our own plan prior to this,” Bater said. “Back in January when COVID-19 was an emerging issue out of China and there wasn’t an immediate threat here, we recognized that this sort of had potential so the city started to update its own plan.”

As the situation continued to evolve into February, the city reached out and asked the Town of Battleford to coordinate together. While working together with the town on their new plan the city’s own updated plan came up at council on March 9.

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North Battleford city council considered tabling the city’s plan for two weeks until the joint plan with the town could be presented and passed in its place. Bater said he is glad they decided against tabling it because of how quickly the COVID-19 situation evolved at the beginning of March.

“We knew we were working on the joint plan with Battleford and there was a suggestion of, ‘why are we approving our own plan when we are just going to have a new plan at our next meeting in two weeks? Why don’t we just table this and wait for the meeting in two weeks?’” Bater said.

“We actually never had that meeting two weeks later because of COVID-19 and we couldn’t have everybody in the same room. If you walk back in time and look at how quickly this developed here we are very grateful that we got that approved that day because we’ve had something for our city management to work with,” he added.

Since then, the two municipalities have coordinated on their preparedness plan and have now updated that plan to be ratified at the next city council meeting.

“Battleford and North Battleford are two different municipal governments but we are one community and the interactivity between both municipalities are daily. It doesn’t really work if we don’t have a plan together,” Bater said.

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Keaton.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow