Mayor releases State-of-the-city address

Every year at this time North Bay’s Mayor makes his State-of-the-city address, and this year the message was very good.

“We had a very positive 2009,” Mayor Vic Fedeli said of the Gateway City. “A lot of communities from around the world are still reeling from the economic downturn, but North Bay sidestepped it and we outlined tonight the reasons why.”

Fedeli attributed most of the success to the proactive role council took this past year.

“Meeting with the developers and saying ‘don’t cancel your projects in North Bay like you’re doing everywhere else – and here’s why’,” Fedeli said.

He added as a result of Council’s movements North Bay ended up with the Shopper’s Drug Mart, Hampton Inn, Good Life gym and the new TD Bank.

“These are all buildings that we did meet with the individual contractors and developers to convince them to stay in North Bay and go for it,” Fedeli said. “As a result we had a great year.”

However, Fedeli did not hide the fact there were some obstacles to for Council to overcome last year, and not much will change in 2010.

“We’re going to do a lot of batting clean-up,” Fedeli said of the year ahead. “Projects we already started and a few new ones.”

Fedeli said the City’s councillors were hard at work throughout 2009, which made things run along much more smoothly.

“Nobody sat on their hands, looked around and said ‘what’s happening?”