OUTLOOK - The town council of Outlook met for a regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday night, November 22. Present was all of Council; Sharon Bruce, Bob Stephenson, Kyle McLeod, Justin Turton, Ryan Husband, and Kevin Grotheim, as well as Mayor Maureen Weiterman, Chief Administrative Officer Kevin Trew, and Assistant CAO Rachel Sillers.
The meeting was broadcast live on the Town of Outlook's official Facebook page.
A number of topics and items were discussed, including the following highlights.
Bylaws
Council discussed two bylaws, including Bylaw 10(2023) Animal Keeping. CAO Trew proposed that Council not hold the third reading of the bylaw, sharing a few words about it.
"As Council's aware, we did introduce an animal keeping bylaw earlier this year, and it was defeated at first reading," said Trew. "That did bring forward the idea of allowing chickens in residential areas in town, and again, it did not pass first reading, so that was defeated, so that bylaw no longer exists. So then, Council had directed me that you would like us to do a new update of the Animal Keeping bylaw with regards to not having chickens allowed in all the residential areas, so we brought back this two meetings ago as Bylaw 10, the Animal Keeping bylaw, and Council did pass first reading, and at the last meeting, Council did pass second reading. So, I have had a bit of concern expressed to me by different people who are in the community that don't seem to understand the difference. We do have this available, and when people have asked me, I have shared it with them. But I'm concerned because I've seen a few comments on social media from people that seem to think that we're going to third reading of a bylaw that includes chickens in a residential area. Even though that isn't what we've proposed, I don't really feel that we've done our best job of actually notifying people what we're doing. Even though we've put everything out there, we haven't actually been very intentional about putting a write-up in the paper or anything like that."
Councillor Grotheim asked if perhaps there was a mixup between 'residential' and 'residential acreage', to which Trew responded that that could partly be the case.
Trew said that maybe the best thing would be to press 'pause' on the bylaw's third reading so that the public can become better educated on the language of the bylaw. It was proposed that something could perhaps be run in The Outlook newspaper as well as online so that people can take the time to learn all about the bylaw before any official decisions are made and passed by Council.
After some discussion, it was decided that Council would pause on passing the bylaw for its third reading, in the hopes that the public can become more familiar with it.
In discussing Bylaw 11(2023) Cemetery Operations, which was also up for its third reading, Trew said that updates had been applied to the bylaw as previously discussed, and with that, the bylaw was officially passed by Council.
Delegations
Clayton Schneider, founder of C4 Outdoors Dust Control appeared as a delegate at the meeting, who shared that as a company, C4 gives 10% of the revenues that they create in communities back to the community.
"The Town can do whatever they want with it," he said. "Being mayor and an alderman, I know that you guys know what's best for that money. I'm proud that our family business is able to give you a cheque for $5,546.00!"
Assistant CAO Sillers took a photo of Mayor Weiterman and Schneider with the cheque, and Weiterman thanked Clayton on behalf of the Town of Outlook.
New Business
Council approved the destruction of old town records information, including old time cards from 2005 and information that even goes back to the 1980's.
Discussing the Town's 2024 budget, Trew said the team at the office has been working on both the operations budget and capital budget for quite some time. This includes meeting in-committee twice with Council, with the first meeting including all of the Town's department heads and the second meeting for Council to ask questions of either Trew or Sillers.
"We're not quite ready to present the budget yet," said Trew. "There are some more questions to be asked and answered."
The goal, Trew said, is to have the annual budget passed before the previous year-end, which the Town is currently scheduled to do at the December 20 meeting.
