In Georgian Bay, there is a first-year mayor with lots of plans for 2019.
Peter Koetsier won the election and has set some near and long-term goals for the area.
MMN: What are the priorities going to be for Georgian Bay in 2019?
We know that one of the ongoing questions that we face is the Macey Bay development and we don’t know what that will bring in 2019.
I’m almost assured that it will be a discussion point.
Planning and development is always a discussion point every year.
Hopefully, we are looking at a little bit of fresh eyes with a partially new council.
MMN: Where do you think Georgian Bay will end up on the retail sales of marijuana question?
We’ve started to kick the marijuana question around.
Right now we are actually doing a bit of a survey of our residents to see how they’re thinking about this.
We’re conscious of the fact that we have to make a decision this January as to whether or not we will be open to the idea of having a retailer in our area.
And quite frankly I think it is running about 50/50 at this point. So I am not sure where we’re going to end up there.
Certainly, I don’t think marijuana was an issue in the past election of who got elected to our council.
And I think those who actually vote online as to whether they are open to the idea or not is a very select portion of our population.
If we say yes we are open then anyone can come on in
MMN: There are possibly some exciting tourism plans for Honey Harbour – can you share that?
The plans for the Honey Harbour re-development included putting in some docks and one of those docks would be a larger dock that could support a larger boat to ferry passengers from Honey Harbour to the Beausoleil Island National Park.
We have a national park in our area and it’s water access only. Obviously, most people are not going to come up with a boat to go to it.
The current boat they use to take people over there maybe covers 10 per cent of the capacity of people interested in going to the island.
So that is one of the things we are definitely looking at as a development.