No images? Click here 20 March 2020COVID-19 (Coronavirus): A message from the Mitchell Shire Mayor and CEOWe are a strong and caring community and it is important we look out for each other. We understand that as the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus) continues it will have a real impact on our daily lives. Our focus is delivering for our community. There are many challenges in doing that in the present environment and, be assured, we are doing what we can to deliver our services safely. It means we face changes around the clock, and we have a strong plan to keep operations moving. We set some principles about our response early on. One of those is that we’ve approached decisions about Council services based on ‘what can we safely keep open’. We believe it is important for people to still be able to carry out essential activities and remain connected in a time of uncertainty. It’s also important our community, workers and Councillors can do this as safely as possible, based on the advice we have available right now. Right now, that advice is saying that as long as we have some extra precautions in place, it is appropriate for most of our services to continue. This could change today. It could change tomorrow. It could change next week. We’re monitoring regularly and we’re adjusting as we need to. To support our community we need to close some services. It will have an impact, but where possible arrangements will be made to deliver those services in a different form. As of normal closing time on Friday (20 March) we will be closing Council-operated gyms in Seymour and Kilmore as well as the Seymour Visitor Information Centre.
We are looking at ways to redeploy staff and our work teams will be split over a number of Council sites to minimise the risk of entire teams being unavailable at the same time. These service closures follow earlier announcements about cancelled events and programs including our school holiday program, library program, youth room services, multicultural festival and aqua classes. We still have a number of essential services operating at this stage including our kindergartens, maternal and child health, immunisation, libraries (although programs have been suspended), customer service, resource recovery centres, kerbside waste collection, building, planning and animal management. We take pride in being an agile Council and responding to the changing needs of our community, therefore we are looking at how we support our business sector and our vulnerable members of the community. Some of our resources will shift focus to provide a more concentrated support in these areas. We are open for business and we have extra measures in place for service provision to continue, but we are mindful of limiting direct contact as much as possible. Operational services can be accessed by telephone or online and we would encourage you to do that wherever possible. We’re monitoring the situation closely and we’re ready to activate further closures or changes quickly if we need to. Our website is updated daily and we have a dedicated space to what Council is doing in these times as well as general advice www.mitchellshire.vic.gov.au/COVID-19. We will continue to provide regular updates to you. We understand that there is much information on COVID-19 being passed around. We will limit our updates to two a week unless there is a significant change in operations. We appreciate this is a difficult and stressful time for many in our community. Look out for each other, and rest assured we will be here in some way, shape or form throughout this crisis and as we eventually head into recovery. We are all facing our own challenges as we work through what this means for us as individuals and as a community, but the great thing about our Shire that we hear time and time again is how well we look out for each other. We need to continue to do this in the weeks and months ahead. We will come out the other side of this, although things might look quite a bit different for a while. Thank you and take care. Yours Sincerely, Cr David Lowe Mayor, Mitchell Shire Council Mary Agostino Acting CEO, Mitchell Shire Council |