It’s a lot of information to handle.
Last year’s municipal elections are long over, but councillors here are still involved in orientation sessions to bring them up to speed on numerous aspects of Centre Wellington’s operation.
Jan. 24 was an example of one of those sessions.
Prior to a regular council that night, councillors spend the day reviewing the township’s corporate strategic plans, getting an overview of growth and development in Centre Wellington, reviewing the financing the services for growth and the role of development charges, and learning more about the protection of sources of municipal drinking water supplies in the Grand River watershed.
On Tuesday, councillors also took part in a special council meeting with representatives of Centre Wellington Hydro to look at its various programs and operations.
The meeting also provided an update of current and projected activities and an update on Smart Meter projects.
Mayor Joanne Ross-Zuj said the orientation process is going great.
“Today we met at the Grand River Raceway early this morning and went through an orientation with our development charges.”
She added “we also had an excellent presentation on our source water protection. Our director of planning Brett Salmon sits on that committee with our director of public works Ken Elder.”
Ross-Zuj said part of that session was “to familiarize councils with the well areas in both the urban centres as well as the actions to protect those sites.”
She said there was also a look at the “tweaking of our strategic plan. We’re well on the way to have that primed for the next four years.”
Ross-Zuj said “It was a very busy day for us and a lot of material (to review).”
The next part of the orientation will be a facilities tour, to be launched on Jan. 31.
“There’s been a lot of material we’ve been covering over the past month.”
As to the directions of the strategic plan for the coming term, Ross-Zuj said “we’re going to have a day where we look at what was successful in the past years. Then we will look at the items of concern, and the directions orders of government that we know are going to take place. All of that has to go onto the table, and we’ll put that out to see if we add something to our three key result areas or whether we just strengthen what we are doing right now.”
“That will take a day of us sharing together, and to debrief after the campaigns to share our views.”
She explained the debriefing would be to ensure what was heard on the campaign trail was discussed amongst “and incorporated where necessary, but we haven’t had that discussion yet, but we will.”
