Yesterday, Sharla Griffiths, City Manager, and Christian Laughland, Deputy Mayor, went to Winkler for the Association of Manitoba Municipalities Cities Caucus. There, they talked about both positives and negatives the City of Dauphin has right now, and heard from Manitoba's other 9 cities.
Griffiths said Dauphin had quite a few priorities, including the Dauphin Regional Health Centre.
"The City of Dauphin talked about a few things, one of them being a flood update, people were very interested in the impacts to our community, and especially the continued closure of the Dauphin Regional Health Centre, with a glimpse of hope and excitement about our emergency room opening...we also talked about the City finishing our big lagoon upgrade. Many municipalities in Manitoba have multi-million dollar projects, either on the books, just finishing, underway like ours, or on the horizon," said Griffiths.
The City of Dauphin's lagoon upgrade has been ongoing since last year, involving $20 million in the budget. Another big project is set to get underway soon in Dauphin - the construction of the new Justice Facility. Griffiths said it could be coming very soon.
"I have not physically seen it, but we're told [the Province is] doing some geo-technical work, so just some testing of the soil, so they can work on the design of the foundation of the building," said Griffiths.
From the AMM Cities Caucus, there were a couple major shared concerns between all of Manitoba's cities - aging infrastructure, and budget constraints for large projects. Like the City of Dauphin's $20 million lagoon upgrade - which puts a significant amount of pressure on the City's budget for the years the project takes.
"Our aging infrastructure, and the budget pressures, like I said for large infrastructure projects, things are multi, multi million dollars, and so we all had concerns about that," said Griffiths.
Griffiths said Dauphin could play host to an AMM Cities Caucus within the next 3 years, but the City hasn't committed yet.
