Clean Production and Toxics

Nipigon AOC receives final funding push

As we reported a year ago in the summer 2008 issue of Great Lakes News, parts to upgrade Nipigon’s sewage treatment plant were sitting unused in a field waiting for the municipality to find their share of the money to install the equipment. After a year of sitting in the field, the Canadian and Ontario governments finally decided to break their rules and cover the municipality’s third.

In June, the federal and provincial governments announced that they were jointly giving $7 million to Nipigon and $9 million to Red Rock to upgrade their sewage treatment systems.

Though the principle of local contribution towards clean-up costs makes sense in most cases, governments need to make sure that their guidelines have enough flexibility to allow them to drop the local payment component when a community is suffering an economic crisis.

Being in dire economic straits should not mean that a community also has to live with the stress of not being able to clean up its environment and force its residents to continue to endure the health threats that contamination problems pose. In fact, a failure to act on pollution can exacerbate economic problems, discouraging positive population growth and encouraging residents and businesses to leave town.

Debate over who pays, and how, is the most frequently recurring reason that municipal infrastructure upgrades and clean up of contaminated sediments are stalled. These are both critical for the restoration of most Areas of Concern in the Great Lakes. The principle usually used by senior governments – federal, provincial and state – is that local sources must pay a substantial part of the required money.

In Canada, for example, the standard formula is that the federal and provincial governments each pay one-third of the costs of these projects. The other third, they argue, should be paid by the municipality or local polluters. This requirement usually leads to substantial delays, if not total stalls, in the project.

This can become an insurmountable problem in areas suffering severe economic stress, such as Nipigon Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior. Major progress has been made on implementing the Remedial Action Plan, but the outstanding problem is the sewage treatment systems in Nipigon and Red Rock. With this funding Nipigon can finally complete their clean up efforts.

© 2009 Great Lakes News.