THREE decisions at Bathurst Regional Council's meeting last week give a sense of the city's future - and how it will be reconciled with its past.
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The first was the approval (with conditions) for a medicinal cannabis operation to the city's north-east, where up to 50 people will eventually be employed.
It's a project confronting in some aspects - the facility will be required to have razor wire on its fencing and manned security during operating hours - but unremarkable in other aspects considering the district has a long history of agriculture in all its changing faces and forms.
And the fact the development application was approved unanimously showed our councillors' level of comfort with it.
Also unanimous at last week's meeting was councillors' support for Jess Jennings' push to get things moving on a city bypass.
Council will apply to Infrastructure Australia for a Bathurst bypass to be a national priority list item - and, in doing so, we might be seeing this long-talked-about local infrastructure project moving out of the realm of sheer impossibility.
There's a long way to any ribbon cutting, of course, but there is a sense at the moment that this project, dismissed for so long, is at the very least on the minds of a number of people in the council chamber. And that's noteworthy.
The third decision at last week's meeting that seemed to say something about the city in 2022 was the permission given to demolish (and replace with a bigger dwelling) a rundown home in Stanley Street that is in the Bathurst Heritage Conservation area (but is not listed as a heritage item itself).
The city has had a number of these debates in recent years - demolition, restoration, public interest, private cost - and it inevitably stirs up local passions.
A lot of the complexity of that debate seemed to be summarised by the Stanley Street home owner when he said at last week's meeting that he and his wife "look forward to making that corner [where the house stands] and that area of the town much better than it is today".
From something old (Stanley Street) to something new (medicinal cannabis growing, a bypass), there remains plenty for our councillors - and, by extension, we who voted for them - to chew over.
And that's as it should be. It'd be a boring old place if all the big questions had already been answered.
