The City of Moose Jaw will be making a number of changes to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, including waiving ridership fees for city transit and paratransit.

Director of Financial Services Brian Acker reported to city council that ridership has been reduced since the pandemic hit and it is an essential service to help citizens get around the community.

City Manager Jim Puffalt added that ridership was down to 20 per cent over the weekend.

“The weekend was really bad, and so we want to monitor today (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday)

and we think it will give us a better idea of what actual ridership would be because now we’re having the businesses closing, isolation is supposed to start to occur,” Puffalt said.

An amendment was passed unanimously that administration gives a pandemic update on at least a monthly basis. Administration is currently giving council daily updates and plan to continue that practise.

Utilities during this time will not be disconnected due to non-payment. The city is shifting to encouraging payment plans for those having issues paying their utility bills. Late payment utility and tax penalties will remain, but that will be reassessed in one month.

Taxation will continue as normal since tax notices don’t go out until the May long weekend, but the door is open to reassessing in the future.

A discussion also took place about upcoming city council meetings. Currently, the public is only allowed to address council if they have been given prior approval and self-declared any symptoms or travel history. Council meetings are also live-streamed.

The next meeting is scheduled to go ahead on April 13 as items are already on the agenda. If stronger measures are put in place by the province limiting the number of people in the room, they will use a virtual meeting as needed. There was an agreement among councillors and administration that maintaining normalcy is important.

City Solicitor Myron Gulka-Tiechko added that the intent of the upcoming meetings is to restrict the agendas to only critical matters. Puffalt said putting together robust agendas will be taxing on administration during this time.

“As you can imagine we are all a little uneasy about the situation that we are facing, the way things are changing day-by-day, hour-by-hour,” Puffalt said. “It’s a little bit, when we are focusing on day-to-day activities, it’s hard to get back to getting reports out.”