At last night’s council meeting a Committee confronted North Huron council regarding the horrid state of Howson Dam. This Committee had the support of about 1,000 people, double what they had at their last presentation. Council chambers were packed with about 60-70 people. Reeve Neil Vincent denied the Public the opportunity to question the Committee or council after the presentation. If you wanted to ask a council a question you had to sit there silent for an hour waiting for the limited Public and Press section at the end of the meeting.
Click Here to see the presentation.
This Committee is not the first one to try and get this piece of infrastructure maintained. The first one gave up after about 6 months due to frustration dealing with North Huron senior management.
Apparently senior management decided in June that this maintenance was not going to happen. The Committee was not told this, and North Huron withdrew the support of town staff for this committee. The Public Works department is to maintain the dam, but just gave up a decade or so ago.
The “Pond” created by the Dam attracted people to town during the summer months for swimming, tanning, water skiing, ice cream, shopping etc.
Our rotting and crumbling infrastructure is literally hurting our local economy.
Under current management we have lost our outdoor pool, can’t use the indoor pool during summer weekends and “The Pond” is at historic low levels. Council has waited so long to fix the Howson Dam, the reserve funds sent aside last century are no longer sufficient to cover the cost of the decay due to lack of maintenance.