The final amendments to the City of Weyburn's Official Community Plan were approved last night by Weyburn City Council.

Work for the document began in spring of 2019, led by the City's Planning and Development Coordinator, Janine Fletcher, and was first unveiled in August of 2020. A number of changes were made recently, which were required from the Ministry of Government Relations. Approval of those was made during the last meeting (read more HERE).

This time, it was brought before Council for approval of the final touches.

Mayor Marcel Roy said the main issue with why it took two and a half years in all, was because, prior to that, the OCP hadn't been updated since 2003.

"With Janine there now, I'm sure that we can get into this on regular basis, so many of the things that we've made changes in the last few years, we're starting to do stuff on a regular basis, and not just when all of a sudden we're being pushed by the government," he commented. "So if we can do it every five years, then it won't be as difficult to do."

He said Fletcher and her team were very thorough and attentive to detail.

"Like so many documents, there's always type-os and there's always the words that are missed," he noted. "I'm very much a scanner so I'll read through a document and you're going, 'oh this looks okay', then people are like, 'what are you talking about?' When you get very long, thick documents, it becomes very difficult. I can't imagine editing War and Peace, that would have been a quite a book to edit."

City Councillor Ryan Janke also added kudos, saying that dotting-of the 'i's and crossing of the 't's is a 'fantastically complicated process'.

"[It's] one of the challenges when we are dealing with multiple levels of government," he said. "But, I mean, it is very important to be done thoroughly, and we're very lucky to have people like Janine, who can go through the kind of level of detail that needs to be done to make sure this gets done to the satisfaction of the provincial government, to the satisfaction of the City, and to the satisfaction of the tax payers."

City Council also approved a budget overage requested by the Weyburn Police Commission for a new bay door to be installed at the Weyburn Police Service, as it could not wait until the next budget year.

Read more HERE.