It was an eventful year in the Energy City with the expected ups and downs of daily living in a city of 13,000 residents plus several thousand more
residing in nearby rural municipalities and neighbouring towns and villages.
There were several events however, that escaped the boundaries of the normal and everyday happenings that became nominations for our editorial panel’s considerations as potential items for our annual Top Ten News Stories of the year.
But first, we begin the countdown with an honourable mention, a topic that just missed making it to this year’s list, but has been included in previous years.
We refer to the announcement made last year of the proposed twinning of Highway 39 and 6 (south of Regina) by the provincial government. The announcement was followed up with open house events that featured proposed routes and designs and some actual excavation and construction on a small stretch of the controversial and busy highway between the Bienfait junction turn and Estevan. That work will continue into 2016 with expectations of further four-lane construction in the near future.
Now on to the Top Ten beginning with:
#10
On June 28, Jamie Molyneux’s day on the beach at Boundary Dam with his daughters was interrupted when he was alerted to the fact that a boat carrying three men, in the middle of the lake, was taking on water in rapid fashion. Before much action could be taken, the men in the boat were reduced to floating figures calling out for help.
Molyneaux, with the assistance of another man, launched his boat from the shoreline and was able to reach the trio within a few minutes. One of the men, a non-swimmer, who was not wearing a life-jacket, was clinging to a cooler, the only floatable object left. One of the other two men, appeared to also be in a state of shock, but Molyneux managed to get all three men on board his own craft without further injury. A search for a puppy the men said had also been aboard the boat with them, wasn’t as successful.
Estevan Fire Rescue personnel and others suggested the cause of the rapid sinking might have been caused by an insecure boat plug or unrepaired damage to the boat. The boat was not recovered, but the three men were, making this a good news story for the year.
#9
This was an ongoing news event with a positive ending. The Hearthstone committee, charged with the duty of raising $8 million as the community’s share of an anticipated $40 million new regional nursing home, reached that goal well ahead of the targeted timeline. The campaign that had begun in earnest in 2013, enjoyed the largesse of the city and its business community that has become a trademark for Estevan over the past several decades. The committee was able to state they had reached the goal in early January of this year, several months ahead of schedule. The new Estevan Regional Nursing Home committee will now see the project through to a conclusion with the hopes that location, design and construction will roll out in a consistent pattern over the next few months.
#8
When the SEIU employees from the South East Cornerstone Public School Division rejected a final offer contract in May, it set the stage for strike action that took the 260 support staffers out of the schools and into the streets, carrying picket signs.
The two-year, four per cent wage increase was the sticking point in the negotiations. With the assistance of a mutually agreed-on mediator, who agreed to come back for a second-round of discussions after three weeks of the strike, the employees accepted a slightly-sweetened offer of 4.5 per cent over two years and returned to their jobs as caretakers, library techs, cafeteria staffers, educational assistants and other support positions. The SEIU represented about half the unionized support employees with the other group, belonging to CUPE, having settled on a four per cent wage increase earlier in the year.
#7
Same party but new representative for Souris-Moose Mountain in the Oct. 19 federal election. Estevan’s own Dr. Robert Kitchen took over where retiring MP Ed Komarnicki had left off by swamping the opposition and reclaiming the seat for the Conservative Party. While most of Saskatchewan and Western Canada stayed true to the blue, the rest shifted their loyalties to the Liberals which meant Kitchen would be taking up a seat on the opposition side of the House of Commons. Kitchen polled 26,315 votes, claiming over 70 per cent of the total votes cast and well ahead of runner-up Vicky O’Dell representing the NDP who claimed 5,131 votes. The Liberal candidate, another no-show or phantom vote chaser, Steven Bebbington still claimed over 5,000 votes from Liberal loyalists and Bob Deptuck tolled just 994 votes for the Green Party. The voter turnout was strong in the southeast with a 72 per cent turnout.
When the dust had cleared by the next morning, the Liberals under their newly minted leader, Justin Trudeau had 184 seats compared with 99 or 100 for the now opposition party, Conservatives while the NDP fell back to 43 seats as third-place finishers followed by the Bloc Quebecois with 10 and the Green Party staying with one seat.
#6
After several years of stalled negotiations, discussions, arguments and several more rounds of negotiations and land acquisition moves, followed by a couple more years of actual construction, a 13 kilometre commercial truck bypass around the city of Estevan was opened in early November, bringing this long-awaited project to a point where it could actually be opened and used by trucks and other vehicles wishing to circumvent the city using Highway 39. The bypass also provided access off another highly used highway, No. 47 north of the city. The opening finally eased the pressure on the city’s former truck bypass which had taken large semi-trucks through the central part of Estevan using parts of Fourth Street and Sixth Street.
