High Prairie Mayor Brian Panasiuk says improving high speed internet connection in the community is the Town’s biggest priority going into 2021.
Panasiuk tells the Trending 55 Newsroom that they were hoping to improve that this year, but the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary halt on those plans.
“We don’t meet the minimum standards and that was one of our goals even in 2020. It fell by the wayside with everything else we were dealing with, but the new grant by the federal government has made it feasible to start working on that again. That’s our number one goal.”
Panasiuk adds that the high speed internet access has been an ongoing concern for the Town.
“We did have a good plan in place, but then a couple of years ago with the change of the provincial government, the funding for that disappeared. That put us on hold for a little while, but we’ve come up with a new plan now.
As for the biggest challenge for this year, Panasiuk says that was balancing their budgets without a lot of revenue coming in from the recreation facilities which were shut down for parts of the year because of the pandemic.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
