Penhold Mayor Mike Yargeau with some of the winter gift packages that were recently delivered to town residents. (Town of Penhold)

By Sheldon Spackman

"I love this community"

Penhold mayor says 2020 was a weird, tough year

Dec 24, 2020 | 10:05 AM

“Weird”, is how Penhold’s mayor describes 2020.

Mike Yargeau says the past 10 months in particular have not been what anyone was expecting or looking forward to coming out of 2019.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Yargeau says the Town of Penhold was forced to lay-off 17 employees

“We shut down our facilities, we lost a significant amount of revenue based out of our Multiplex, we changed the entire way we do community events, and it almost felt like we were starting to get back some of that. Now we’ve shut everything down again.”

Despite the pandemic, Yargeau points out that the Town’s Community Services department was still able to help residents come together.

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“With our Winter Warmup packages, 1,300 hand-packed gift packages from local vendors all around central Alberta were hand-delivered to every home in Penhold, at a time when a lot of people really needed something like that. And the way our Community Services reached out and started doing PYC (Penhold Youth Club) online events where they were going to anyone that signed up and dropping off packages for them to do activities all together online later on that evening or the next day.”

Yargeau says The Town of Penhold changed the way it reached out to people this year, and feels it did an amazing job while doing so.

“I’m proud of my council group how we came together at the start of this and talked about how it’s important that as community leaders, we need to be on the same page and we need to be open and honest with people and talking about the decisions we’re making and talking about public safety measures,” explains Yargeau.

He admits, however, that having to lay-off staff during the pandemic has truly been the hardest part so far.

“We’re a small community. You’re laying-off people that have been a part of this community, have volunteered at community events and have been around this community with their families forever right? And you’ve got to be part of that group that makes a decision that we need to lay these people off.

“It’s been tough to go through that,” he continued. “Like the second round especially, we’re talking three weeks before Christmas. We don’t have a lot of options but there we are laying-off 15 people in our town. It hurts.”

Looking ahead, Yargeau anticipates COVID-19 to remain a focus moving forward.

“We had passed a budget but will probably have to make some changes depending on how long this goes on. We’ll have to look at cutting costs wherever we can and I think 2021 is probably going to be a lot about COVID-19 again. You know, how we start to open things back up, how we start to bring the community back together, whether it’s through public events or however we’re allowed to.”

With a municipal election slated for October, Yargeau revealed he does plan to seek a second term in the mayor’s chair.

“When I first ran to be the mayor, I always thought I wanted to do at least two terms,” he admitted. “Personally, it’s a great honour for me to be the mayor of Penhold. I love this community, I love serving the residents here, I think we’ve done a lot of good in the last four years, and I think we’ve got a lot of good things to come for the community and I want to keep doing it.”