Dryden Mayor Craig Nuttall resigned Tuesday morning, citing personal reasons.
"There's a time when a person has to look towards the future and also look at where teh city is now and I'm quite confident I'm leaving at an excellent time," he said.
"We have a tremendous treasurer and a CAO that have been putting our finances in order."
Nuttall was elected to lead Dryden in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014 after presiding over a near-collapse of the city's finances.
By 2013, Dryden's debt had reached $40 million and its public telephone utility was tumbling $10,000 further into debt each day. Reserves had been depleted and the city's line of credit was nearly exhausted.
Then in January, the Domtar Mill's value fell 70 per cent in a property re-assessment, putting a $1.7-million crater in Dryden's budget. Under the terms of Domtar's assessment, Dryden was also ordered to pay the mill back $5.4 million in taxes the city had collected since 2009.
Discussions around the council table ranged from falling under provincial management to declaring bankruptcy.
Council's response was to cut 44.5 jobs from its 143-employee workforce, privatize the Dryden Municipal Telephone System and contract out its emergency services call centre to Orillia.
While it increased Domtar's taxes 134 per cent to recover the assessment gap's impact on industrial revenue, Council held the line on residential taxes, delivering two consecutive budgets with zero per cent rate increases. Both budget votes passed by only one vote: the mayor's.
"We had a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of us councilors and myself," Nuttall recalled.
"I think we had to look at our financial situation and just figure we couldn't afford to have telephone and we couldn't afford to have the call centre at the police department. We really had to bite the bullet. My big sorrow is, we had to eliminate some employees. You never like to do that."
When Nuttall leaves office on Aug. 28, Dryden's debt will have been halved to $20 million. For the first time since he took office, the municipality has money in reserves and highway infrastructure has been renewed throughout the city with minimal impact on the local budget.
At Council's first meeting in September, it will declare the mayor's seat vacant. It can then either call a by-election or appoint someone to that seat. That appointee can either be an existing councilor or Greg Wilson, who placed second to Nuttall in the 2014 election.
