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The next two months within the City of Estevan’s council chambers should provide councillors and local residents with some interesting scenarios.

The bar of governance has been raised slightly over the last two years as Estevan got into preparation mode for the Western Canada Cup and the Saskatchewan Summer Games last spring and summer.

It was a tribute to our city that we managed to apply those finishing touches, at some substantial cost in spite of the fact our once-booming oil patch had gone bust.

Residents showed resiliency and perseverance while pulling off a couple of big-time hosting events, one of them just a couple of short weeks after a devastating rain storm that caused flooding havoc.

Now, with no new major feature facing us in the immediate future, we wonder which direction our city council will take.

Will the three new faces at the council table create a new governance model for re-elected Mayor Roy Ludwig and incumbent councilors Greg Hoffort, Trevor Knibbs, and Dennis Moore to cope with? Or will it be business as usual?

Will newcomers Shelly Veroba, Lyle Yanish and Travis Frank begin a new era of growth and provide fresh ideas once they feel more comfortable in their councillor skins?

We hope they do.

We feel they can set up a few challenges for the incumbents, not as boat-rockers or anti-establishment figures, but rather as new people with different ideas.

What this council doesn’t need at this stage of its recovery process, are radicals or rogues on council, but it could probably welcome a few new concepts and be open to striking out in different directions, when the need arises.

For the past two years, the focus has been on first organizing the debt and deficit picture to make a little more sense, and then reducing it.

This was being done right in the midst of preparing for and spending money on not only repairing some major infrastructure items but also beautifying our city in a meaningful and sustainable fashion. It wasn’t easy.

Now is not the time for council or any of our local committees to rest on their laurels. There is still plenty to do, even if we aren’t playing host to any substantial provincial or national event this year. We shouldn’t need an excuse to keep pushing progress.

The only thing that could put a kink in our financial and rebuilding plans would be another pull back of funds from the province’s revenue-sharing program which was just recently restored to previous levels of support.

Faced with a growing debt, the provincial treasury may suddenly decide to no longer share that one per cent of sales tax revenue with the cities, towns and villages as it has in the recent past. They could decide to renege on the promise and keep the money in the provincial coffers to reduce their own debt-load which would put cities like Estevan back into a debt spiral of their own … once again.

We trust that won’t happen, but then we never expected the province to renege on the historical reimbursements of Workers’ Compensation Board funds (profit) that they kept in provincial hands this year, instead of handing them back to those who funded the program in the first place. That money was needed, and wasn’t delivered, so it wouldn’t be surprising if political expediency and financial pressures made that $262 million in revenue sharing, suddenly unattainable.

If that happens, Estevan may just need some fresh ideas at the table to enable us to keep our sights set on growth rather than on an unexpected financial contingency plan.