Morden Mayor Brandon Burley said 2021 was an interesting year that not many people will forget, when looking back on a year filled with challenges and highlights

With the affects of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the way municipalities could deliver services and programming to constituents, Burley remarked they wanted to start producing and to start doing things to meet the challenges head on without sacrificing safety or results. In March, Morden won the bid to host the Vaccine Super Site.

"The Vaccine Super Site, obviously, at the Access Event Centre was a big feature for us, it allowed us to avoid operating losses in our Community Services Department. Anytime you can face a Pandemic and have buildings closed and not run deficits, that's always a success. So, we were very happy to be able to accommodate them and to have won that bid. It did take quite a bit of organizational and operational challenge, but Shared Health, Southern Health and our administrative group were really good in being able to pull that off in a very, very small timeframe."

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"One of the big ones for us, I think, was our organizational and administrative successes. We rounded out our Senior Administrative team this year, as well as got our back books and our financials completely caught up to date. We have a City Manager in Nicole Reidle and a new Finance Director, who was a success story out of our Morden Community driven Immigration Initiative. He came to us through that program, from the Pembina Valley Water Co-op. We are so very fortunate to have those people as key figures or organization. The targets we had been given from the province, with respect to getting our financials caught up in 2018, we exceeded them by 8 months."

Finally, Burley also praised the increased economic development in Morden.

"And lastly, I would look at our success on economic development. In 2021, we set out somewhat to prove that the conversation about, it was either best practice around COVID or economic growth, that there was a dichotomy there and a false one, we sought to prove that. We were targeting markets and segments of the market and the economy that were in flux and were transitioning because of COVID. In early 2021, Farm King made the announcement that they were closing the Duluth, Minnesota plant and moving the production to Morden, so that really started off a great year for us. And then, as the year progressed, we are able to bring in several major employers into the region, to the point now where the spin off and the cycle around those announcements has led to the result of us having no industrial land left to sell. Moving into 2022, identifying and acquiring and developing industrial land is the next phase of this for us."