The vote for the smoke free area bylaw, designed for Main Street, is expected for next month's council meeting. (File photo)

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The Town of Antigonish’s smoke free area bylaw is being put on-hold for another month.
During town council’s regular monthly meeting Monday evening, council decided, due to the absence of councillor Willie Cormier (who had work related commitments) and their desire to meet as a group to discuss the community health impact assessment (CHIA) regarding the proposed bylaw, it will be next month’s council meeting before a decision will be made.
Cormier, along with councillor Liz Chisholm, were part of a steering committee for the CHIA and he was to give a report during Monday’s meeting.
“We’ll have another meeting before our March meeting,” Mayor Carl Chisholm said. “(The public) will be advised as to when that is and, at our March (regular monthly) meeting, the smoking bylaw will be passed or defeated.”
Chisholm said, in hindsight, council probably should have scheduled a meeting for this month so they could have moved forward on the bylaw vote but, especially in light of Cormier’s absence, it’s best to wait until next month.
Arena work
Council passed a motion to send a letter of support for the Antigonish Arena which the arena will include as part of an application to the province for funding.
The funding will be used for work on the building’s roof.
Chisholm said the letter request came out of a recent arena commission meeting. He, along with town councillors Sean Cameron and Donnie MacInnis, are part of the commission.
“As far as total roof costs you’re probably looking in the vicinity of $100,000,” Chisholm said.
New policies
In his Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) report, Stephen Feist including two new policies which council voted to accept.
The first policy dealt with public hearings and the second with employee conduct.
“Basically we didn’t have a public hearing policy in place,” Chisholm said. “Since Stephen has come here we’ve had one public hearing take place and from what he saw transpire, during that public hearing, there was a couple of things he thought we should tighten up on. So he has come up with a policy that certainly, I as chair of public hearings, will be able to use to facilitate a much better public hearing.”
Chisholm said the employee conduct policy is basically the same sort of fine tuning of rules and standards that Feist, with his many years of experience in charge of municipalities in the South Shore, had adopted from other workplaces.
“And it (having Feist in the role of CAO) has been nothing but good so far,” Chisholm said. Library hours
Council received a letter back from Pictou Antigonish Regional Library (PARL) stating that, at this time, they will not be able to include Sunday hours at the People’s Place Library.
Chisholm said the request was made for Sunday hours as councillors heard from the public that because Sunday is considered a family day and the library is a good place for family activity, the People’s Place Library should include open hours on Sunday.
“It’s a budget thing again,” Chisholm said. “They’re looking for more money from the province.”
Chisholm said there is still a possibility with library board chair Mary MacLellan and chief librarian Eric Stakehouse saying, at a recent meeting, they’re still “looking at it.”
As for the idea of switching hours so that the library could be closed on a Monday and opened on Sunday, Chisholm said the problem then becomes for the other groups in the building, like GASHA and ACALA, who need to be opened Monday to Friday.