After many long months of discussion, survey-taking and question-asking, Weyburn's city council decided to set the levy for the proposed new acute-care hospital at $140 on residential properties.
This was the lowest of three levies proposed by the city, and received the most votes in the city's survey - but this is not saying much as only 10.7 per cent of survey forms were received back.
Is this the end of the issue? Hardly; now, the Weyburn Chamber of Commerce wants to have a meeting, bringing together the important stakeholders of MLA Dustin Duncan, the Sun Country Health Region, the Weyburn Hospital Foundation, the City of Weyburn and the chamber.
There are many questions about this; first of all, the meeting is to be "closed-door", which is absolutely wrong, as the "public right to know" is paramount in this situation. Indeed, the whole reason for the info session is the questions that the public has about the proposed hospital, which they were asking of the city but only the health region and the province could answer them.
So, if the public are the ones posing the questions, it is completely wrong and inappropriate to turn around and seek those answers, but in a "closed-door" private meeting to which the press is not allowed to attend. In addition to this travesty of democracy, the chamber did not commit to bringing the answers to the public, but only said they might share them with chamber members.
The second puzzler is why the chamber is doing this when only residential property owners will be assessed the levy; chamber members, ie., business owners, will not be paying it, so what is the interest of business owners?
Rather than the chamber, the city or Sun Country (or both) need to organize a public forum to have these questions answered - not at a "closed-door" meeting that shuts out the public.
The most important party in all of this has yet to be heard from: the provincial government. Perhaps today's budget (Mar. 21) will have an answer, but the thing is, for city residents to have their answers and to get behind the levy to provide our share of the hospital's cost, there needs to be a commitment on the part of the government that there will in fact be a new hospital provided for Weyburn. Otherwise, everything else is moot - we need to know.
