Mayor urged to include marginalized people on city’s recovery task force
Marginalized and homeless people downtown are dehydrating in the heat for lack of water bottle filling stations in the COVID-19 pandemic, one advocate told the mayor and councillors during an online council meeting Monday.
Susan Gauthier said she has been walking the streets with others giving out bottles of water to people. “That’s how concerned we are.”
Public washrooms are open only until 5 p.m., and public buildings where there are water bottle filling stations — the Peterborough Public Library, for instance — are closed due to safety precautions in the pandemic.
It means marginalized people are left in heat waves with little to no drinking water and no washroom access in the evening and nighttime hours, Gauthier said.
It’s one of the reasons she and one other advocate, Trish Campbell, asked Mayor Diane Therrien on Monday to consider including marginalized people and their advocates on a new task force to help develop ideas for the community’s postCOVID recovery.
Therrien will strike the new community task force. It will exist in addition to the mayor and warden’s economic recovery task force, struck in April and co-chaired by Therrien and Peterborough County Warden J. Murray Jones.
Therrien will choose community members for the group, and they will serve a term of at least six months from July to December. Meetings will take place virtually or via teleconference.
Gauthier said it needs to include “the actual voices” of marginalized people, to ensure their issues and needs are a priority.
“Poor people are among those most vulnerable to the serious effects of the coronavirus,” she said.
Therrien said there have already been “lengthy discussions” at the city’s emergency group meetings about reopening public washrooms — and ensuring those washrooms are sanitized adequately — in a pandemic.
Public washrooms aren’t open around the clock yet, she said, but the mayor told the two concerned citizens that she understood their point and would follow up with them later.
“I fully understand where you’re coming from,” Therrien said.