By Cheryl Jahn

City in Recovery

Aug 21, 2020 | 2:11 PM

RINCE GEORGE – “And then I would go for a walk and there would be absolutely nothing. Nothing going on and the sickening feeling in my stomach. ‘How do we recover from this?’ ‘What is it gonna take? Who’s gonna be left standing after all of this?'”

That is how Mayor Lyn Hall describing the downtown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Provincial Health Office ordered many venues to close, and people began working from home. The downtown felt like a ghost town.

But, as the recovery begins, he noted some businesses have come back ”

You know, you have the White Goose Bistro and just up the street, you’ve got Homeworks. You’ve got Betulla Burning, Nancy O’s. There are businesses that have mainstays in our community for a very long time. And I need them to continue to be that anchor.”

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And he says City Hall will do things differently to bring those businesses back downtown and keep them thriving.

“And this has forced us to look at doing business completely different because we know we’re going to get requests that we’ve never heard of before,” he noted. “So patios in front of restaurants and pubs, closing streets down. They’re looking at that in other municipalities.”

But while those are short term recovery ideas, thoughts must be cast to the longer-term solutions to grapple with the two crises facing local governments: COVID-19 and the opioid crisis.