The Town’s philosophy on re-opening during pandemic

Following a question to Town Council from the Independent at the last Council, Town CAO Brent Kittmer supplied the following explanation:
The Town’s approach to reopening has been deliberately slow to ensure that we are taking the steps we can to protect public health and safety. All Town of St. Marys re-opening decisions are guided by the Town’s Municipal Operations and Services Recovery Framework. This reopening strategy document was previously approved by Council on June 9, 2020 and outlines two key principles that guide our decision making:
Principle #1 – The Town will reopen its operations and services on its own timeline, when it is confident that the health, safety, and well-being of staff and the public can be maintained.
Principle #2 – The Town will reopen its operations and services in a scale appropriate and fiscally responsible fashion.
An important point of clarity is that the Town cannot reopen any service or program until the Province has announced that public health restrictions have been eased and permits the service/program to be reopened. Once this occurs, this triggers staff’s development of a reopening plan for the service/program. Of paramount importance is the Town’s ability to reopen a service safely to protect the public and our staff, and to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. To do this, staff compiles all of the existing public health rules that apply to the service/program reopening and then develop a plan of how the Town will meet these rules. If specific rules or guidance do not exist, staff then collects best practices established in other Canadian jurisdictions or by relevant Provincial associations to establish the inventory public health guidelines that need to be followed.
To be clear, operating municipal services and programs under pandemic rules is more costly. There is a common misconception that the Town should be saving a considerable amount of its budget from the lockdown, but this is not the case. Like all municipalities, the Town is projecting a significant deficit as a result of the pandemic. Council has a fiduciary responsibility to the public to ensure that municipal spending does not exceed the Town’s capacity to afford the spending. To that end, Council has set a target of a $250,000 operating loss for programs and services reopened in 2020.
Once staff are confident that the Town has the ability to meet all of the public health rules required to reopen a service, they then move on to develop an updated operating budget to run the service. If the cost of pandemic operations is extremely excessive, staff presents this information to Council along with options to reduce the financial impact to the tax base, including service level adjustments or increased user fees. We need to be mindful of the costs of opening up because there is a risk that blindly opening up without considering finances will result in an even larger operating deficit at the end of 2020. We have a concern that the real financial and economic impact of COVID-19 will be felt in 2021. We recognize that we need to be mindful that we can’t increase taxes in 2021 for costs we could have reasonably managed in 2020.
The final piece of the puzzle is how we prioritize the opening of services. Prioritization is done by evaluating where the most amount of public benefit accrues and how many residents will benefit from the reopening. The best way to think about it is: if the Town had $10 left to spend, and we had to make a decision to open a service like a park that is widely accessible to all versus a specific program that only benefits a few, the Municipal Operations and Services Recovery Framework guides us to open the service (like a park) that has the potential to benefit the most people. Recently, the reopening of the PRC has attracted much interest, with questions arising as to why the Town isn’t opening up faster, and why the Town is opening one amenity over another.
First, it’s important to recognize what the Town has in the PRC. The PRC is a unique multi-plex. Very few community centers in the province have two ice pads, a pool, a seniors centre, home support services, health care services, a youth centre, meeting rooms, a commercial kitchen, a community hall, and a wide slate of associated programs services all under one roof.
The timeline of the PRC reopening has been a function of the Provincial rules. When the Province announced Stage 3 of its reopening plan in late July, they had a strict rule that facilities were limited to a total of 50 persons in the entire facility. This included multiplexes like the PRC. Internally, we made the decision to remain closed because we were not prepared to prioritize opening one area of the building over the other (i.e. open ice over aquatics, or open aquatics over the Friendship Centre, etc.). We felt all patrons to the building should be treated equitably, and we put our efforts towards working with the local health unit and the Province to develop a reopening plan where we could operate each area of the PRC separately with 50 persons.
In Late August, the Province further eased their rules, and gave permission for multiplexes to open and operate with up to 50 people per amenity area, where safe separation can be achieved. Thankfully, by this time we had already developed a reopening plan under this model, and Council approved the PRC reopening plan on August 25. Much like our overall reopening strategy, with the PRC Council remained committed to taking things very slowly so that we can ensure that we have all the necessary protocols in place to open safely.
Recently Council was asked to reconsider the ice pad reopening plan that sees only one ice pad being operational in the initial phase of reopening. Council considered this request on September 15, and reaffirmed their strategy to reopen all facilities slowly and cautiously and directed staff to continue with the plan to open only one pad on October 1. Staff will be reporting how the reopening is progressing to Council on a weekly basis, and if things go well, Council may consider opening the second pad for November which is two months earlier than the initial plan of January 2021. One change that has been made from the initial plan is that dressing rooms will now be opened with limited capacities. We need to do this to allow enough space in the rooms, the hallways, and the lobby for patrons to spread out, tie skates, etc.