EMBRUN – During a recent council meeting, politicians with the township of Russell were updated on the municipality’s business plan.

“This is a beautiful report to show how busy we are as a corporation,” Mayor Pierre Leroux said.

On March 21, interim chief a0dministrative officer Richard Godin provided council with an update on the results of the 2021 business plan, as well as the expectations set for the 2022 business plan. Council received the report with little discussion.

“This is a report that shows that we’ve been very busy last year and we’re going to continue,” Godin said. “As council knows, our business plan is kind of our lists of projects and initiatives that we’ll be working on. For the 2021 recap, of the 140 items that were on our business plan about 82 per cent of them are either currently underway or completed.”

In his report, Godin noted that the COVID-19 pandemic did impact what staff was able to do in 2021. Of the 140 planned actions or projects, 58 were completed, 59 are currently underway or about to be completed, and 23 were not started, either being deferred to 2022 or cancelled.

The report also included information on the capital project list, which saw 141 items planned for 2021, which was up from the 107 in 2020. Here, 68 of the projects were completed, 63 are still ongoing, and 10 were either not started or cancelled.

“In 2022, so we are presenting council with 150 items,” Godin said. “It is a very ambitious business plan. They’re mostly items coming from either the strategic plan initiatives addressing recommendations we’ve had from studies and [from] provincial obligations.”

A list of both the 2021 and 2022 business plan items can be found in the March 21 council agenda package. This can be found online via the township’s website (Russell.ca).