Mayor Grant Forster says this year had its challenges, but he’s proud of the way Esterhazy has been able to handle it.
“I’m not sure I can describe it! I think in general it was a strange year,” he said. “Strange, but at the same time I think it was a successful year from the perspective of the Town of Esterhazy.”
Most municipalities in Saskatchewan went through the same situation Forster thinks, with everybody prioritizing health and safety by doing everything they could to keep people safe despite the constant changes and unknowns that have come with the pandemic.
“We’re like everyone else,” he said. “We went into lockdown with our employees from the month of March we had the town office staff working every second day and we had our public works team working every second day to try and limit the exposure of people to the virus. We got through that month and once the province started to move the restrictions up that they had place on everyone, we went back to full-time.
“We made some adjustments, especially with the office, but we managed to get through it and we were able to adjust on the fly as best we could. Everything was changing so quick, we’d make a decision today and tomorrow it was already out of date and we had to do something different. From that perspective, we learned a lot in terms of what we could and couldn’t do and how we view things. I’m pretty happy with the way we were able to adjust on the fly and at least get us to some semblance of being able to still serve the town and get things done while still being able to keep people safe in dealing with the virus.”
Forster can’t wait to get back to some normalcy so residents of the community are able to enjoy recreation facilities without having concerns again, but he’s not sure if 2021 will bring that kind of ease.
“We can hardly wait until we can get back to where we don’t have to deal with recreation facilities either being closed or at limited capacity in terms of what we can do,” he said. “We can’t wait to go back to having full-time rink and full-time pool. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to where it was two years ago where we were used to doing things a specific way, but we’ll do what we have to do.
“If the province says we have to limit to 50 per cent then we’ll limit to 50 per cent, we won’t be happy with it—obviously we want to get back to where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing and if you want to swim then you swim and if you want to play hockey then you just go play hockey. That would be ideal, but it remains to be seen whether that will happen or not.”
