During the annual Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference, Thunder Bay’s delegation tackled issues like crime, housing, and infrastructure.
This year’s event took place in Ottawa from August 16 to 19. City officials had discussions with seven provincial representatives, including various ministers.
Among those meetings were Infrastructure Minister Todd Mc Carthy, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health Sylvia Jones, and Solicitor General Michael Kerzner.
A key announcement from the conference was that both provincial and federal governments will allocate $1 billion for infrastructure projects in municipalities that don’t charge development fees.
“We’re the only municipality over 100,000 people that doesn’t have development charges,” said Coun. Trevor Giertuga, who chairs the city’s intergovernmental affairs committee. “We’ve been lobbying for years to get this, and a billion dollars with such a large community like ours.. it’s going to [have] a significant impact on our community.”
Coun. Kasey Etreni, who is also part of the intergovernmental affairs committee and attended the AMO conference, mentioned that it’s still uncertain how much funding Thunder Bay might receive.
“People have already reached out asking how much of a piece of the pie are we going to get out of that $1 billion,” she said. “At this time, we don’t know.”
Giertuga highlighted another positive outcome: hearing about the province’s plans for improvements along Trans-Canada Highway through Thunder Bay, which includes replacing six sets of traffic lights with interchanges.
“The Ministry of Transportation told us that they will be giving out the contract next month for the design-build for 13 kilometres of the expressway,” he said. “That’s the first step of a $450 million project.”
“We have a bottleneck coming into Thunder Bay, right?” he said. “That’ll alleviate a lot of our transportation issues in conjunction with the Northwest Arterial, which is the $33 million project.”
“We told them we’re prepared to put some skin in the game here and contribute, collaborate with the province for this.”
Other topics discussed during the conference included what will happen to the former Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital property on Algoma Street North.
Although it remains marked as “under review” on Ontario’s surplus property site, Giertuga noted that officials informed them they would have first dibs if they choose to sell it off.
“They said that it’s not needed by other ministries,” Giertuga said. “So it’s surplus, and we will be the first one at the table with them, and in conjunction with First Nations,[with] our proposal for that area.”
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