MOOSOMIN — The past year has been busy in the Town of Moosomin, and newly minted Mayor Murray Gray had a lot to share when the World-Spectator caught up with him for his take on the year in review. With just over a month in his new role, Gray is pleased to see the diversity represented on council.
How do you like being Mayor so far! Was it what you hoped it would be?
It is, I knew what I was getting into! I’m enjoying it, I’m learning lots, and I’ve got a fair number of new councillors, too. So together, we’re putting the best foot forward, and on a path as to where we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There’s definitely some little things that we all would like to see happen in the future. I’m happy with the election results, and I’m happy and honoured in order to be able to serve as mayor for sure.
It seems like a real diverse team, and a good mix of former council and newcomers as well.
And every age bracket is definitely represented in the group, which is fantastic. So it’s good. The voters did an awesome job. When you give them that many choices, chances are certainly better of getting it right than acclamation.
Especially with the results of a very busy election season.
Between the provincial election and then the one that followed right after with the municipal election, it was a crazy couple of months around here, for sure. You can look at it two different ways. You can look at it as people aren’t happy with the way things are, so they want change, or they look at it being a good thing, and they want to be part of it. And I think for the most part, it’s that people see how great things are going, and they would just want to be part of it.
What were some of the highlights for 2024 in your opinion?
Well, the housing grant and then the campaign that went with that—the national attention that we drew from that—I think was huge. That was definitely a highlight. Also we are pretty proud of the amount of paving and infrastructure we were able to replace, with a million dollars worth of paving. I think that was definitely a highlight as well, and a much-needed project. So those would be the two highlights.
There have been lots of other highlights, but those would be the top of the pile for me. I could probably list 30 highlights, if you wanted me to list them all, but those are the ones that I think had the biggest impact on our residents.
With the housing incentive, there’s been quite the momentum built around it. Do you see that momentum flowing into 2025?
As we fill up the number of doors that we need to add, we’ll definitely have to pivot in order to keep the momentum going, for sure. It’s nice to see the builds that we’ve had going, and any interest people are having in order to keep that going for sure. So people have lots of plans for next summer for some more building yet again. It’s great to see.
Were there any challenges that the council faced last year that stick out in memory?
A couple that I can think of that we’re dealing with, unfortunately, there were some delays in the water treatment plant. It was supposed to be up and running originally in October, and we’re waiting on some parts in the control equipment in order to get it making water. So I guess that would be one challenge. I could think of couple other things that I know have been a little challenging as well, Dutch elm disease in our trees. So we’re trying to get ahead of that, because we’re losing some of our beautiful trees that because of the age of the town, some of the other trees are dying as well, but the Dutch elm, you got to try to keep ahead of that so you don’t lose them all.
When the town is 140 years old, some of those trees have been standing for 40 years, and they’re aged out. We need to get a program to replace them as we take them down. I think the other challenge that I would mention would be just with the population growth and the busy-ness of our community. Some of our rec facilities are getting pretty maxed out. So that’s another challenge that we will have going into the future, with all of the things that we have on the go.
Good challenges to have—ones that come along with signs of growth.
For sure, I mean communities that are retracting have a totally different set of problems than us.
Are there any ‘wish list’ items on council that you just didn’t quite get to in the past year?
There are a couple projects like I already mentioned. The water treatment plant was definitely one we had hoped in order to have it up and running before the election, there was a water line that goes under the tracks on Moose Street that was supposed to be done this summer, that never got done. Those are the only two things that I feel as though we had on the radar that didn’t get done.
Obviously, we have other projects on the wish list, but they weren’t necessarily earmarked for this calendar year. In my eight years on council, we’ve always pushed back a couple projects that you either run out of time or you’re waiting on engineering or waiting on other things in order to have them happen.
Looking forward to the next five to 10 years, what are some of the things you’d like to see happening in Moosomin?
Well, we definitely want to continue to add some businesses and services to the community for steady growth—we’ve had an influx of population. Steady growth, year over year, I think is attainable. A population in 10 years of hopefully in that 3,500-range, continue that upward trend. We definitely want to see, or hope to see, some more senior housing because there is a demand for that as people retire to the community because of our health care, and then continue to add the services within the hospital, as it has become definitely a regional hospital, as far as the services we provide and the area that we provide services to.
You mentioned the hospital. The CT scanner has been a pretty hot topic. Is that something that you’ll maybe continue to push forward?
There is hope of that in the near future, in order to find a pathway to have that project completed, where we’ve got some money raised for it. I think we’re well on our way, we just need to finish that project off.
