By Chad Ingram

The following are brief reports of items discussed during an April 23 meeting of Dysart et al council.

Dysart et al council is passing a bylaw that will restrict the lighting off of fireworks in the municipality to certain holiday weekends.

Those weekends will include Victoria Day weekend Canada Day weekend and Civic Holiday weekend between 8 and 11 p.m. Fireworks will also be permitted on New Year’s Eve and the following day between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. The bylaw will also create a notice outlining the municipality’s regulations that must be posted anywhere fireworks are sold. It will also ban Chinese lanterns. Violating the bylaw will result in a $100 fine. The bylaw is scheduled to be formally passed at council’s next meeting along with an updated noise bylaw designed to be more enforceable by bylaw staff than the township’s previous and vague noise bylaw. Violating that bylaw will also come with a $100 fine.

No replacement of stairs

Council is supporting a recommendation from the municipality’s infrastructure and equipment committee to remove the disintegrating wooden stairs that lead from York Street to the Head Lake Park parking lot and instead of replacing the stairs create a sidewalk in the area that will provide improved access to the parking lot.

“We definitely know that we need to remove the stairs that are there but do we replace them with more stairs?” asked Mayor Andrea Roberts.

“Stairs are a barrier an accessibility barrier” said Councillor Larry Clarke in his support of the committee’s recommendation.

Other councillors agreed.

A staff report indicated that the Haliburton BIA is also supportive of the plan.

“In conjunction with this discussion the committee reviewed correspondence from the Haliburton BIA that they were in favour of replacing the stairs which would allow for optimal use of the tourism advertising board that is currently located at the bottom of the stairs.”