Mayor Brosseau attends Alberta Municipalities’ Spring 2022 Municipal Leaders conference

Mayor Elisa Brosseau from the Town of Bonnyville recently attended the Alberta Municipalities’ Spring 2022 Municipal Leaders conference on March 9 and 10 at the Edmonton Convention Centre.

This year’s Caucus was open to municipal elected officials and senior administrators from Alberta municipalities, and was a tremendous opportunity to network and build consensus on key issues affecting the community of Bonnyville.

“This was a really important conference for us to be at and this conference is a lot more intimate, a lot smaller and so you have a little bit more access to ministers as they enter the room,” Mayor Brosseau told Lakeland Connect in an exclusive interview on the Morning After. “You can go right up to them. You can have a chat with them, as opposed to some of those bigger conferences where you have you know, let’s say 1000 people, and that makes it almost impossible to have those ones on one with a minister. So it was really great to get out and we just we felt in our element and we’re out there representing Bonnyville.”

While at the conference, Mayor Brosseau said Town of Bonnyville members which included Brian McEvoy made it a mission to access the Minister of Transportation Rajan Sawhney.

“Councillor McEvoy and I, we made it a mission to access the Minister of Transportation or to have the opportunity to go up and have a chat with her,” Mayor Brosseau said. “They did do a study on Highway 28 all the way from Edmonton to Cold Lake. But we really feel that this area in particular between Bonneville and Cold Lake really needs to be identified as a priority, especially with last summer we had a couple of major accidents with fatalities. And we just know with industry starting to get busy the highway is gonna have more and more traffic on it. So we really want to make it a priority. So we took the opportunity to get in front of her and just have a conversation on highway 28.”

Mayor Brosseau extended an invitation to Minister Sawhney.

“Of course, I invited her out to have a tour and take a drive on the highway and see what she has to say about it,” Mayor Brosseau said.

Mayor Brosseau also took the conference as an opportunity to speak with Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping.

“I had the opportunity to speak with Minister Copping who’s the Minister of Health,” Brosseau said. “And I just wanted to, again, have the opportunity to introduce myself and just say how great our model is here for emergency services. And by that I mean our Regional Fire Authority that we have with the MD and as you know we will be moving into a brand new location which I think is just going to enhance our health services here with 911 Fire and EMS all being under one roof.”

At its February 9 meeting, the M.D. Council agreed, in principle, to transfer the former Kopala building to the Bonnyville Regional Fire Authority (BRFA).

The building will house the administrative offices, Station 5 Bonnyville, EMS services, and 911 operations.

“I think it is a really major project for our area and something that’s really great and so again, I took the opportunity to invite him out once that building gets open and just wanted to get his support for our project.”