By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
When the BCN caught up with Brigham Mayor Steven Neil for a belated 2024 year-end interview on Jan. 6, Neil took the opportunity to announce the lifting of a boil-water advisory in the Guay sector. The town replaced the aging, convoluted pipe system under the 22-home residential development in September with help from a provincial program.
“As of today, at least in theory, everyone is on the new system,” Neil said. “There is no boil-water advisory in effect for the first time since 2007. I’m very glad to get that off our plate.”
Alongside the water network situation, Neil said the town’s biggest challenge over the past year was maintaining its extensive road network. “Having such a big municipality in terms of kilometres of road, finding people who could do the job at a cost we could afford was a challenge. Because we were redoing the water network in the Guay sector, our staff spent a lot of time dealing with contractors when they would have been doing other things. That stretched our resources a little thin, and we weren’t able to do some other things we wanted to do.”
“Over the past few years, we have been doing the minimum in terms of road work because of a lack of availability of staff and entrepreneurs,” he said. “We’ve been behind the curve ever since COVID, because we lost employees and it was hard to [recruit] an inspector. We now have the staff available to do what we are behind on.”
In the coming year, the municipality plans to move forward with the maintenance of wooded areas along local roads, digging ditches, chopping brush and paving work. To finance the road work, the residential tax rate will be raised by one cent per $100 of assessed value and the agricultural rate by three cents. “We needed the extra revenue to do more work than we usually do,” he said. Road work and other transportation-related expenses make up 45 per cent of the planned expenditures on the 2025 budget.
Other major expenses include increased snow removal costs and training for the town’s newly hired building inspector. The town also plans to carry out extensive lighting and road studies, with a view to replacing street lights with LED lights and creating a detailed bylaw listing the town’s roads and speed limits, “so if there is a modification or if the police need to know something, they have one document to check.”
Neil was first elected mayor of Brigham in 1999 and served until 2013. He decided not to run in 2013, but returned to office in 2017 and has led the town of about 2,450 people ever since. In 2023, he said he didn’t plan to run again. “I told people over a year ago that I was leaving – this is a preparatory budget for a new council to come in.”