The town of Parrsboro is still struggling to provide the province with financial information that should have been filed by Sept. 30th.
The town has hired an outside expert to help pull the figures together. The province needs them for the Financial Condition Index it publishes to help citizens judge how well each municipality is managing its finances.
Parrsboro and the Municipality of Pictou were the only two of 54 municipal units to miss the Sept. 30 deadline.
Bruce Purchase, a retired financial officer with the Municipality of Colchester, arrived at Town Hall today to begin compiling the figures after the deputy minister of municipal affairs met with Parrsboro councillors last week.
At its meeting on Tuesday, Town Council authorized the hiring of Purchase blaming the missed deadline on problems with new computer software the town had purchased.
Mayor Lois Smith says Purchase will return to Parrsboro on Tuesdays and Thursdays until the reports are completed. She would not say how much he will be paid because the terms of his contract are confidential.
Meantime, she says the town is hoping to have its financial audit for 2013/14 ready for presentation to council at its meeting in March. The audit is separate from the information the province requires for its financial index.
See earlier story here.
Parrsboro Nova Scotia — Bruce Wark started this website in 2015 before moving to Sackville NB? I started Tantramar Landowners Association in 2015 after a lot of censorship by the Town of Sackville online and discovering them happy to ignore the youth who presented in Town Hall about a new skatepark in the summer of 2013 .. I was surprised they went ahead with a $1/2million playground rebuild and splash park instead of a great concrete skatepark and I felt the disappointment of the youth in the Mayor Berry’s decision to do this project instead of the youth’s skatepark project and I wondered if it was because the group was represented by the previous Mayor Pat Estabrooks grandson Ethan.. perhaps I will never know the politics of this small town but there is definitely an agenda at work that is “rotary” led.. Mayors with Rotary connections should not be elected to lead the direction of the town in future.
Comment from Bruce Wark: Yes, this blog dates from February 2015 covering news in the town of Parrsboro and vicinity. I had been covering Parrsboro news for CICR-FM, the local community radio station for about two years, but finally quit in frustration and started my own local news service. After moving to Sackville in 2016, I started covering local news here mainly for CHMA-FM, the campus/community radio station, but after a year, I quit to devote more effort to Warktimes. CHMA does not cover much local news even though it’s supposed to under the terms of its broadcast licence. I send radio versions of my Warktimes stories to CFTA, the community station in Amherst. As far as I can tell, very few people listen to CHMA. Each student at Mt. A. is required to contribute $40 per academic year to CHMA and $33 to the Argosy, the student newspaper. Unlike CHMA, the Argosy actually covers campus and town news.