Town council recently ratified the creation of an economic recovery team tasked with developing and implementing an action plan to respond to the impending closure of Dura.

When the plant closes next month 150 employees will lose their jobs, in addition to the 250 who have been laid off from the plant over the past 18 months.

The recovery team will be under the town’s economic development advisory committee (EDAC), and will be chaired by Bracebridge Mayor Don Coates.

Cheryl Kelley heads EDAC, and said last week the team will focus primarily on Dura, but will also look at the state of the local manufacturing sector as a whole.

“According to 2001 stats, the manufacturing sector is about 12 per cent of our workforce, and since 2001 we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. At one point in time there were 530 people employed at Dura; that’s a significant number of jobs in our community,” she said. “The idea is for us to look at what the best scenarios are to create jobs, and not just any jobs, but jobs of that calibre, with the same wage scale and benefits.”

Kelley said in the short term, the team will be looking at what jobs are currently available, but they will also focus on business attraction.

There are no terms of reference for the team yet, said Kelley, but with the plant’s closure just around the corner they will have to kick things into high gear quickly.

“We have to get on this sooner rather than later. It will start this fall for sure,” she said. “The people involved in this group have been in working committees before, so it’s not like it’s a totally new group that has to form and go through all of those processes. They should be able to hit the ground running.”

The group will likely include members of EDAC, the Canadian Automotive Workers (CAW) and representatives from other levels of government.

“FedNor will be involved . . . they have indicated that there are funds available for community recovery processes,” said Kelley.