Taking care of parks and recreation, keeping the electricity on, and dealing with emergencies are just some of the public works’ services offered in New West.
Mayor Patrick Johnstone has proclaimed May 19 to the 25 as Public Works Week in New Westminster.
“Public works infrastructure, facilities, emergency management and services are of vital importance to sustainable communities and to the health, safety and well-being of New Westminster,” said the city’s proclamation. “Such facilities and services could not be provided without the dedicated efforts of public works professionals, who are responsible for and must plan, design, build, operate and maintain transportation, water supply, wastewater systems, solid waste collection, public buildings, and other structures and facilities essential to serve our citizens.”
Stacey Neves, the city’s superintendent of solid waste and recycling, recently appeared as a delegation before city council to outline some of the work done by public works employees. She provided council with some City of New Westminster statistics from 2023.
This includes: installing 206 new electrical services; planting 594 trees on city-owned lands; repairing 1.6 kilometres of sidewalks; caring for 250 animals; and collecting 2,500 metric tons of recycling and 6,000 metric tons of organic material. In 2023, the city’s engineering operations division dealt with 3,200 calls for service and/or maintenance, the police service responded to 18,000 calls for service, and the fire and rescue service responded to 7,500 calls.
The American Public Works Association has sponsored public works week throughout North America since 1960. This year’s theme is: Advancing Quality of Life for All, which aims to highlight the way public works professionals advance citizens’ quality of life in a variety of ways, such as restoring power during an outage, attending to a city emergency, planting new trees, or collecting solid waste.
“Our internal committee wanted to focus on three goals this year,” Neves said. “One: celebrate what we do in public works. Two: educate the public, especially school-aged children, on what public works is, what we do and how it contributes to our daily lives. And three: we wanted to show our dedicated, hardworking staff just how much we appreciate the work that they do day-in and day-out.”
What’s happening in New West?
Scavenger hunts – for students and community members – are among the ways the City of New Westminster is highlighting public works as part of its 2024 campaign.
“In the past we've held an open house at the public works yard but this year we wanted to do something a little bit different,” Neves said. “So, we wanted to reach out to all of our schools in the district and essentially bring the campaign to them.”
Neves said the city will be sharing videos about public works with schools as part of an interactive opportunity for learning. She said schools will be provided with an opportunity to have a staff member attend and present on public works to students in classrooms or at an assembly throughout the year.
Students at local elementary schools are invited to take part in a scavenger hunt, where they will identify different elements of public work infrastructure around their schools. That includes examples such as catch basins and street signs.
“For our middle schools, we're holding a competition and asking the students to draw what recycling right means to them, which is the tagline that we have adopted for our 2024 contamination reduction campaign,” Neves told council May 6. “Their artwork will be placed on the 2025 calendar and on our garbage trucks, in addition to all of our digital and print materials for 2025.”
Public works staff will be attending a career fair at New Westminster Secondary School in November.
In past years, the City of New Westminster has held a public open house at its works yard to highlight Public Works Week.
“We'll be participating in the təməsew̓txʷ (Aquatic and Community Centre) grand opening celebration on June 1, where we'll join our colleagues in the superhero zone,” Neves said. “We will have an interactive booth and materials on how to reduce contaminants in our recycling stream and also have a garbage truck where the kids can enter, operate the arms, lift the cart into the hopper, and have some fun with that.”
Community members still have time to take part in a scavenger hunt, which gives them a chance to win prizes. After downloading and printing the scavenger hunt (or picking one up at city facilities, community members will walk around their neighbourhood and make a note of what you find for each of the items – and submit their completed scavenger hunt form by May 31 to be entered into the prize draw.
“For the community as a whole, we will be holding a community-wide scavenger hunt,” Neves said. “Again, focusing on bringing awareness of what public works is and how it advances the quality of life.”
