With officials pushing to have something in place right away, North Battleford city council approved a pandemic policy at its council meeting Monday night.
But the policy adopted on Monday will likely be replaced by an updated and more comprehensive policy at the next council meeting, as city hall looks to have in place proper procedures to address the current COVID-19 outbreak around the world.
What council essentially did Monday was formalize an existing pandemic plan that had been prepared several years earlier.
That planning document, discussed at Planning Committee, was never formally adopted as policy and “very rarely used,” said Fire Chief Lindsay Holm. The plan covers such things as notifications of a pandemic, vaccine and antiviral protocols, social distancing, preventative measures, personal protective equipment, service levels, time off work, and employee reporting to work procedures.
On Monday night, administration recommended formally putting it in place as policy, but emphasized a more comprehensive policy is already in the works and would come back for approval in two weeks.
The updated policy would cover COVID-19 and would include more standards. It is also going to be a coordinated policy in conjunction with the town of Battleford so that there is an integrated response by both communities; Battleford would need to sign off on it as well.
Both communities have already announced a joint administrative committee has been struck to coordinate in advance of a possible pandemic.
Some concerns were expressed by councillor Kelli Hawtin about bringing in a policy only to have it replaced by a new policy two weeks later.
Patrick responded that typically he would ask to delay until the new policy was ready, but cited the rapidly emerging situation and need for some “temporary authority” for the city to deal with it.
“This is a moving problem,” said city manager Randy Patrick. “If there was no risk, yeah we’d wait, we wouldn’t be giving this to you right now.”
“I think it’s just a prudent step, and I don’t think we’d bring it to you otherwise if we didn’t think it was important to have that infrastructure in place to allow us to be able to make some decisions if we were affected by the virus,” said Holm.
