Red Pheasant Cree Nation (RPCN) held a grand opening for its new Operation and Maintenance Shop which will aim to maintain various aspects of the community including road maintenance, sanitation, water treatment and more.
“The shop is giving us the benefit to help our community and service our own equipment and provide our services for the roads, water, garbage and maintaining and helping look after the community as one,” said Mike Wuttunee, manager of operations and maintenance for RPCN.
Mike Wuttunee during the grand opening. (Image Credit: Alyssa Rudolph/ battlefordsNOW)
Wuttunee mentioned that on top of their three main services, which are roads, water and sanitation, the shop will also be helping with the Red Pheasant arena, as well as general maintenance for baseball fields in the area.
“We’re trying to serve the community and get everything self-efficient here as well and keep building our capacity where we can branch out and help the surrounding areas as well.”
Not only does the shop increase the services available to people in RPCN, but it adds employment opportunity as well.
“We always need operators, we have resumes, we had some job fairs as well to bring in and recruit more people,” Wuttunee said. “We have summer students coming in and help us with the lawn care for elders, maintaining the cemeteries as well. Hopefully in the future we have more employees here, more equipment to operate, and help us out here in the future.”
(Ryan Lambert/battlefordsNOW)
The director of economic development agreed with Wuttunee, recalling a time where the department staff was only made up of one person.
“Now we have a manager in place and a lot of full-time staff that are now responsible for that work,” said Austin.
He explained that up until roughly six years ago, employees in the nation were brought in from other service providers. Through programs like the Operations and Maintenance Shop, community members have the opportunity to fill those spots; now occupying over 100 positions.
“We have become more reliant on ourselves rather than external contractors. It just provides good security for the assets. Previously, the assets would be at workers’ homes. There’s no control over the use of them, repairing them; we just have that security now.”
For Wuttunee and RPCN, a very important factor behind the shop opening is self-sufficiency for the nation.
“The leadership building up, it means so much to help the community out and hopefully we can provide all the services doing our water and our septic and have our own services where it stays at home, all the money stays into our community as well.”
As the shop celebrates its grand opening, Wuttunee showed his gratitude.
“I’d just like to thank the leadership for giving us the opportunity and providing services for our community and giving me the opportunity to help our nation as one.”
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Alyssa.rudolph@pattisonmedia.com
Ryan.lambert@pattisonmedia.com
