Armstrong council had plenty of accomplishments to celebrate in the past year, as well as lots to look forward to in 2026.
The current council now has more than a full year under their belts after being elected in a byelection in July 2024.
“We’ve rebuilt our staff in the last year and a half since this new council has come on. Getting our staffing in place has been a major accomplishment and I’m pretty happy with that,” he said.
“The first year that we were on council was about getting things up and operating again. Then this last year allowed us to sit back and talk about where we need to move forward and what we need to do.”
Reeve Garry Wasylowski shared some of the accomplishments and projects going on in the municipality.
To start, they resolved a Disaster Financial Assistance claim dating back to 2022 for previous flooding.
“After this council got elected, we asked for an extension and we got it done this year,” he said. “It’s one major project off the list.”
The municipality also completed a study related to its landfill and transfer stations.
“We had some concerns about running out of room and having to be prepared to rebuild a new cell. It turns out we’re going to have capacity for a few more years, so we’re going to look at the operations and streamline it,” he said.
“We think that the landfill is going to last longer than we thought it would. That was another major thing that we did this year.”
The RM also completed a major land sale in the northwest corner of the Chatfield area.
“There was a lot of vacant land that didn’t have anybody leasing it at this point in time,” he said, “so we decided to put it up for sale and it worked out well.”
Looking ahead, discussions are underway about building a firehall in Fraserwood.
“We are out of room for all our equipment in Fraserwood and Inwood, and we’re looking at a way to make this work. We’re probably looking at acquiring some land,” Wasylowski said.
“We talked to the Evergreen School Division, which has a piece of property in Fraserwood where the school used to be. We are hoping that we could acquire that because that would be a perfect place to build a firehall in Fraserwood.”
Council is also working on the 2026 budget, with a public meeting coming up on April 9.
“We just started sitting down as a council and talking about what our goals are for the budget. We’ve got to be prepared for our budget so that we’ve got money when it’s time to get projects done,” he said.
“It is election year and we are going to look at our ward boundaries and maybe be shuffling some things around.”
