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Your LOCAL Media since 1918! VOLUME 107: ISSUE 04
www.tofieldmerc.com
Welcome Back Assembly at Tofield School Inside!
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Beaver County interactive open house at Spilstead Hall
Beaver County hosted an interactive experience at the Spilstead Community Hall on September 11 with 63 residents in attendance throughout the day. It was an insightful event for Beaver County staff and residents alike, with the opinions of residents helping form new bylaws for the county. Lisa Kuflay Staff Reporter
On Wednesday, September 11, from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Beaver County employees transformed Spilstead Community Hall to give the residents an interactive experience. They were ready to answer questions, as well as some councillors that were present. Sixty-three residents, not including children, attended. When people entered the hall, they were asked to write down their names, and then they were given coloured stickers. According to Tracey Popick, Beaver County Communications Coordinator, each colour represented where people live: yellow was for rural residents, orange was for subdivision residents, and blue (no one came) was for hamlet residents. This was
to help see trends and understand the residents' perspectives. As residents followed the paths and arrived at each station, they placed their stickers on what mattered to them most. There were 21 in total, including the welcome station and all the “did you knows.” CAO Kayleena Spiess explained, "One of the sole purposes of why we are doing the public engagement is to design a community standards bylaw that will break out a few different components into different audiences seen as how the county is evolving. We have urban and rural mentalities kind of mixed into one. We have people that are in hamlets and we have people in subdivisions, and then we have people in the rural part of the county." Spiess further discussed that the county wants to
create better parametres and measurements in those various areas. For example, things related to unsightliness, noise, nuisance, dogs, and animal control are thought of differently in the varied audiences. Therefore Beaver County would need to measure it differently through a different standard of a bylaw. So, instead of everything and everyone being grouped together, Beaver County has split up the different areas to be managed and enforced differently. The three distinct areas are subdivisions, hamlets (little towns), and then the rural areas (farming). Beaver County is working on this toward the end of the year, and a lot of the data collected will be used towards bylaws and land use bylaws. Bruce's public engagement earlier this year in June Continued on Page 8