Regional Crime Prevention meeting in the works

Newly elected Reeve for the Municipal District (MD) of Bonnyville, Greg Sawchuk, is coming through on one of his biggest campaign promises, to hold a regional crime prevention meeting. The meeting will be held town hall style, with all the stakeholders at the table, explains the reeve.

“We’re going to be reaching out to all of the folks that have some input. That’ll include our MPs (David Yudiga & Shannon Stubbs) & MLAs (Scott Cyr & Dave Hanson), the City (of Cold Lake), the Town (of Bonnyville).” Reeve Sawchuk plans to reach out to the County of St. Paul’s Reeve, Steve Upham, as well as the communities in the St. Paul area. “This problem spans all of rural Alberta.”

The goal of the meeting is to get information out to the public, as well as hear from the public, explains the reeve, “there seems to be a lot of unanswered questions. We want to try to quiet the vigilante talk that’s going on. Let [the public] know that it’s not going to be fixed overnight, but at least we’re working on it.”

As the MD approaches budget deliberations, Sawchuk says on of the items of consideration is increasing the RCMP force through MD funding. “There is a couple line items in [the budget] where we’re looking at spending more on law enforcement.” The increase in funding also refers to increasing the budget for the MD Public Safety Department, “nothing has been decided yet.”

Due to commitments and time restraints of the MPs and MLAs, the meeting may take a while to organize, explains Reeve Sawchuk, “it would be nice to do it within a month. But, it’s going to be dependent on when we can get those other government representatives together.” The federal & provincial representatives are both in sessions, so it could take upwards of 90 days, Sawchuk promises it won’t take longer than three months,”less than 90 days”.