With two seats vacant in Dryden’s city council, the remaining members have the task of selecting two additional councillors to fill the vacancies by appointment.

The candidates are to be former mayors or councillors who held office since 1998.  There were eight members of former council who were eligible.  Five of those have entered their name to stand for the current temporary opening.  Those include Joe Delany, Sally Rowat, Velma Silver, Keith Sveinson, and Sid Wintle.

If only two candidates had put their name forward, there would have been an automatic appointment.  Being that there were five, there are two options for council to proceed.  First is a confidential vote using a weighted ballot, taking place at an open meeting.

The second is to put all candidates names into the proverbial “hat” and simply draw two.

Councillor Brian Collins suggested that a vote would simply turn into a popularity contest and would prefer to have the names drawn from the hat.  One of the remaining three councillors agreed, with one councillor refraining from comment and Mayor Anne Krassilowsky preferring the voting method.

At the upcoming July 19th meeting, council will decide on the method to choose the new councillors. No matter what the method used, two new councillors will be in place by the end of the meeting, with their official Oath of Office at a later date.

With the King St. underpass closed completely for one day, and down to one lane for another four days, Dryden residents will get a taste of the inconvenience that the Duke St. overpass closure will bring.

With a complete closure beginning on Monday, July 19, the overpass will be torn down and reconstructed with a reopening of October 15.

“We’re hoping to have it reopened earlier than that, but we can’t promise anything,” says Blake Poole, Manager of Capital Planning and Technology for the City of Dryden.

Traffic congestion is definitely a fear for residents and the city alike, with detours including Gordon Road, Sandy Beach Road, and the King St. underpass.

“I think traffic might be a concern for the first week or so, until people get used to it,” says Poole.  “People will find alternate routes, find how many extra minutes they need to get to work.”

Four portable variable message signs will be installed at different entrances to the city, giving traffic advanced notice of the bridge closure and the alternate routes available to them.  Traffic, lights and signs will all be monitored by the city throughout the three-month period.

With the exception of the pier structure underneath, the entire bridge which was built in 1963, will be demolished.  Everything is being replaced, including the approach slabs, the bridge deck, girders, structural steel, new asphalt, sidewalk and railings.  The new bridge will be relatively the same size as the existing structure.

“It was deteriorating, it wasn’t in danger of collapse or anything, but the structural steel and the concrete were deteriorating,” states Poole.

With 90 per cent of funding coming from the Province of Ontario through its Connecting Link funding, as a provincial connector road, the city will only have to pay the remaining 10 per cent of the costs.

No temporary alternate routes will be made available across the tracks, as there could be a year or more of a wait to have the process approved and prepared by CP Rail.

CP Rail will have a flagman onsite at all times of construction, stopping work while trains are traveling beneath.  Plans are being made to have a crane brought in, housing a very large container, to catch debris as the existing structure is demolished.

Dryden Forest Management Company (DFMC), is in a very difficult position with the new Forest Tenure and Pricing System proposal from the Ontario government.

Led by Manager, Jack Harrison, DFMC is comprised of a group of loggers, not a single entity such as one mill.  DFMC is a small forest management company that runs the Dryden Forest in a very similar way to what the Ontario government is proposing with its crown corporations.

“Right now we do all the forest management planning, all the marketing of the wood, and selling it,” says Harrison.  “We don’t think the proposal is good timing, with the economy being down for one thing, and secondly there’s so little detail on it.  There are a lot of things that could go wrong”

Some Sustainable Forest Licenses (SFL) are currently held by a single entity, usually a larger mill such as Domtar, and they look after the forest.  One of the problems with that is there are a variety of other mills that utilize that forest, some of them being competitors, which tends to lead to problems with wood flow.

“It’s unfortunate that they’re doing it now, because our markets are so low,” reports Harrison.  “They want to put in this crown corporation that will be mainly market driven, but there’s no market right now.”

The province wants to conglomerate four  to eight forests into one crown corporation, residents feel that would take away any “local” feel or input into the corporation.

The province currently has two initiatives in place.  The first is a wood supply competition that was initiated last winter for access to the 11 million cubic metres of unused wood in the region.  Those interested in gaining a wood supply commitment were to write a letter of intent to the Ministry, followed by a business plan.  This part of the competition ended in March, and the Ministry is now going through the six-month process of selecting who will receive a wood supply commitment.

The wood supply commitments would assist many of the smaller and newer operations that the Tenure Proposal is attempting to encompass.  The problem is, one level of the Ontario government is offering a wood supply competition, and another is saying they want to take it all away.

“Who’s going to invest and put money into it, when the province is going to change the game and you now have to compete for wood and you don’t know if you’ll be able to survive,” speculates Harrison.

The second initiative currently in place is the Co-op program.  Single entities are being turned into co-op’s to run the forests, and everyone is getting the wood that they need. By changing to the proposed tenure plan, it will eliminate all the work that the co-op partnerships just went through, and give it all to a crown corporation.

“Private industry has managed all the forestry, basically forever, and now you want to take that and give it to a government,” laments Harrison.  “Put this on hold and think about it, but finish the wood supply competition, give them wood supply commitments so they can invest in Ontario, finish the co-op process so they don’t have mills fighting over wood, and that will solve 90 per cent of the problems.”

“This tendered sales happened in the 70’s, and it was a big disaster,” says Harrison.  “A lot of new entrants tried to come in and bid high to get the wood, but they didn’t know how to log, so they ended up going broke, and the local people didn’t end up getting the wood.”

- Ally Dunham