Community involvement is alive and well in St. Laurent, where a recent open house drew a crowd of more than 100 attendees.
The well-attended event took place on Saturday, July 20 at the St. Laurent recreation centre, where residents had a chance to learn about ongoing projects and share their own ideas.
“The open house was better than expected,” said Reeve Richard Chartrand. “We received nothing but positive comments.”
The informative event included introductions of council members as well as representatives running the information booths.
“I provided all in attendance what the RM has done over the last year and what we are looking forward for next year,” Chartrand said.
“Each councillor then provided information on the various portfolios and committees they were on. CAO Billie Jean Oliver also provided additional information regarding the running of a municipality.”
In addition to the municipal council, representatives were on hand from various groups including Nav-CARE, Community Futures, Age Friendly, CDEM and the South Interlake Regional Library.
“We also had a booth for our fire department, Chamber of Commerce and recreation centre,” Chartrand said.
“There were displays of various options regarding our Old Town Hall, expansion of our lagoon, expansion of our assisted living centre and Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority facility. There were also plans for our Métis Heritage/Smithsonian Museum project.”
For each of the municipality’s projects, attendees had the chance to ask questions and submit written recommendations.
After enjoying some light snacks and refreshments, members of the public visited the Old Town Hall to check out recent renovations and share feedback for the building’s future. A travelling Métis heritage display was also set up at the Old Town Hall with two volunteers on hand to explain different artifacts.
Economic development officer Denise Allard agreed the event was a success.
“Everything went very well with valuable information provided to the community. For myself as EDO, the most valuable information we were able to gather was the wants of the community in terms of the Wellness Room we created this past spring. We have a Wellness Room in our post office/welcome centre to provide much-needed services for our members,” she said.
“The idea of the Wellness Room is to have a different service come on a certain day of the week every week from Monday to Friday. For Saturdays, we were thinking to have a service come one day a month on that day to provide a monthly service. We knew we absolutely wanted a massage therapist and a chiropractor but did not know what the community preferred the other days, so we were able to get their votes at a table set up to highlight the Wellness Room.”
Overall, the most popular vote was to have a physiotherapist offer a weekly service, followed by a naturopath and a homeopath. For monthly services, the three most popular votes went to having a medicine man or woman, a Sho-Tai practitioner and a shaman.
“To date, we are very fortunate to have Angelica Kerbrat of 310 Wellness on Main in Stonewall come every Wednesday to provide massage, reflexology and acupuncture in our municipality. She is kept busy and has the St. Laurent location as an option for booking online,” Allard added. “We have Dr. Stephan Cooper, a chiropractor from Winnipeg, lined up to come once a week also but do not have a start date for him yet.”
All in all, Allard is impressed with the outcome of the open house.
“We were very pleased with the turnout we had and the input we received from the community,” she said.
