NIPAWIN — A long-time Pineland Co-op board member was recognized for his 35 years of service as a delegate and 19 years as a board member.
At the co-op’s annual general meeting March 14, Ron Breadner received the Saskatchewan Co-operative Merit Lifetime Achievement Award.
“It feels humbling, it really is, because I was just doing my thing,” Breadner said, who ended his role as the co-op’s vice-president at the meeting.
Breadner said the co-op means everything to him because as a member, he owns a part of the organization.
“You’re a proud owner of a co-op, so you like to see your business do good”.
Pineland Co-op president Morley Doerksen said the co-op is doing better. The co-op decided to enter a management agreement with Lake Country Co-op around a year ago after facing a period where they had difficulty finding a general manager.
“Everybody is getting along great,” he said. “The morale is better than it ever has. I’m really happy with how it is going and I have a better feeling than I have for years.”
The co-op generated $1.9 million in profits in the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Oct. 31. In the previous year, it raised $2.4 million.
Most of those profits are due to patronage payments from Federated Co-operatives Ltd., which, among its other operations, runs an oil refinery near Regina
“They had a really good year at the refinery this year,” Doerksen explained in terms of the patronage refunds. “They got a really cheap supply of crude oil.”
Local members can expect $1.3 million devoted to their patronage payments compared to $1.6 million the year before.
Looking ahead into 2019, plans include a new agro chem shed being built at the south side of town.
“We been working on this a lot of years and we were hoping to have it up a year ago but it just takes a lot longer to get the permits through, feasibility [studies done],” Doerksen said. “We were hoping to get it up this spring, because we were running out of room to store our chemicals because we have to have them in a legal facility.”
Another project is cardlock upgrades.
“We were in dire need of that for a lot of years, it takes a long time to get these projects up.”
Doerksen said the co-op is looking at renovations to the marketplace and the C-Store to make them look more modern and up to date, but that would need board approval.
“It’s still a long ways into the future,” he said.
