He’s no longer Mayor of East Ferris, but that hasn’t stopped the municipality from celebrating 40 years of municipal service from Bill Vrebosch.
The municipality feted Vrebosch on the weekend in Astorville with a celebration of service at the East Ferris Community Centre.
Vrebosch, who is now a North Bay city councillor, said he enjoyed the event and it gave him a chance to visit with people he hadn’t seen in a while.
Vrebosch took office in East Ferris in 1978 and served as its Deputy Mayor.
He later ran for Mayor and over the decades he has either served as Deputy Mayor or Mayor and never lower than the deputy.
Vrebosch says the community grew from about 1,800 to around 5,000 people before he retired as Mayor last fall.
“You got to live in the North Bay area but in a country, rural setting,” he said.
He’s seen a large number of projects become reality over the years including building an arena.
Over those years Vrebosch has not been a fan of going into debt to pay for those projects.
The municipality employed a pay as you go system where it used its surpluses to build infrastructure.
However, Vrebosch says as the population grew and more projects were approved, the surpluses and reserves shrunk.
“So we turned to debt-financing,” he said.
“But we did it responsibly. We went to Infrastructure Ontario where the interest rate was so low that I couldn’t turn it down.”
One of Vrebosch’s biggest accomplishments was the Ministry of Transportation finally agreeing to re-work the intersection of Highway 17 and Highway 94 also known as Corbeil Corners.
The site has been the scene of many serious collisions.
Vrebosch had so many discussions with the MTO over the years that at one point he told the bureaucrats he was going to sit on a lawn chair at the site and stop traffic if that’s what it came down to.
However, last year the MTO announced plans to improve Corbeil Corners, which includes eliminating a hill that partially obscures nearby traffic, installing traffic lights and adding a passing lane on Highway 17 at Johnson Road.
Vrebosch says he would have preferred a traffic circle instead of the lights because a turnaround has the effect of slowing traffic right down.
He settled for the traffic lights and hopes motorists on Highway 17 don’t speed up to 120 kilometres an hour when the light turns amber to they don’t face a red light.
On the passing lane, Vrebosch says this will make it easier for eastbound traffic on Highway 17 to make the left turn off the highway and onto Johnson Road.
“When you make the right hand turn off the highway, you just make that turn and there are no impediments,” Vrebosch said.
“But when you’re turning left and you’re on a two-lane highway, all the traffic behind you has to stop while you wait to make that left turn.”
Although Vrebosch decided not to seek re-election in East Ferris for another term last fall, he wasn’t done with politics.
He took a run at North Bay council and won a seat and joined his daughter Tanya in the council chambers.
