The Warden of the Municipality of the County of Inverness says it was a challenging year.
Betty Ann MacQuarrie says they spent the year making massive infrastructure upgrades.
In a year end interview with The Hawk, MacQuarrie said key issues were water and wastewater.
“It was a very challenging year, right from the start, and it didn’t get better,” she said. “It just seemed to get a little more complicated along the way, and then to complicate everything, in September, we had Dorian which knocked our socks off.”
MacQuarrie said the reason it got so bad was because the municipality had been using minor fixes for years, and they’re lucky something worse didn’t happen.
She said that meant they needed to raise the tax rate for the first time in about a decade.
However, MacQuarrie says the year’s biggest failures led to their biggest successes.
She said they put in a huge amount of work to resolve those issues.
“We are on top of it, and we’re making improvements,” she said. “As long as that will continue, all of the infrastructure systems in the county will be running the way they should be.”
MacQuarrie said they’ve started, and completed, upgrades at many of their plants and are working to install generators for extended outages.
She said they’ve also outsourced their solid waste collection in order to improve service.
MacQuarrie wouldn’t confirm if she’ll re-offer in the 2020 municipal election.
