YORKTON – On Monday, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Government of Canada announced funding for the city through the Green Municipal Fund during a virtual conference.
“The fund provides grants and loans for municipal projects that mobilize local action, leverage community resources, and drive innovation for solutions,” said Dan Vandal, MP for Saint-Boniface-Saint Vital, and Minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada.
"I'm very pleased to announce $150,000 from the GMF for the city of Yorkton as it studies upgrades to its water treatment plant,” said Vandal.
Mayor Mitch Hippsley attended the virtual conference and expressed his thanks to the FCM and federal government for their consideration.
"This is just perfect timing to get the proper, professional consulting to look after us so that we head down the right road," said mayor Hippsley of the funding.
"The City of Yorkton has been carefully maintaining its water and its effluent treatment, but we recognize that the rules and objectives keep on becoming more stringent, as [they] should,” said Hippsley.
"With growing interest of ag based businesses that we are bringing to our city, we continue to attract water-bearing type industries to invest here, and it creates more demand on the responsibility for our effluent management. So, this is perfect timing [for the funding]," said Hippsley, adding, "the GMF will be of major help as we prosper with industry.”
The GMF aims to combat climate change on a local level through the study and funding of sustainable renewable energy.
"Across the north and throughout the prairies, we've witnessed the impacts of climate change through drought, wildfires, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and record temperatures; that's why we must all work together to fight climate change and to grow our economy,” said Vandal, adding, "climate change is one of those things that is measured globally, but it's really felt locally- in our communities where we live, where we work, and where we play. That's at the local level in our cities and in our towns where we can make a real difference."
"This program is about building resilient communities that are environmentally, economically, and socially vibrant,” said Taneen Rudyk, First VP for the FCM.
"In Saskatchewan, GMF has funded about 47 projects that are now completed; projects that have contributed 14.9M dollars to the economy and created 159 jobs,” said Rudyk, adding, "these investments through the GMF will help build cleaner, healthier communities. This is possible when municipalities and the federal government work together to develop innovative solutions to reduce pollution."
"Municipalities own 60% of the country's public infrastructure, and we influence over half of all green house gas emissions. That means local action is critical, and local action is happening,” said Rudyk.
Yorkton wasn’t the only municipality in Saskatchewan to receive funding. North Battleford and Oxbow were also recipients.
"By putting this new system in place it's done a number of things for our community,” said Doug Pierce, mayor of Oxbow, on upgrades made to the municipalities' lagoon system.
"We took a lot of years to decide which direction we were going to go with it. The system we chose was the most cost effective and probably the best thing for our community as far as the user pay and the ability to grow our town without putting it on the backs of our rate payers,” said Pierce.
North Battleford received $175,000 to study ways to reduce energy consumption at its municipal facilities.
"We were able to use this funding to hire experts to come into our facilities and do an immediate review of the facilities to understand what we're currently doing in these facilities,” said David Gillan, mayor of North Battleford.
"We've already received the report; there is some zero cost initiatives, meaning, initiatives we could take on right now and have already taken on to reduce energy, things like air handlers and mechanical systems,” said Gillan, adding, "there is some capital initiatives that the city is currently looking at, namely solar panels on all five facilities, as well as the potential for production of energy through biomass. We do happen to have, in the northwest here, quite a bit of input for biomass energy production, namely wood chips as well as oat hulls.”
"As far as the investment in solar panels and biomass, we're still in the process of analyzing that, but there is significance when you're talking about just the solar panels alone, I think it's in the neighbourhood of 20% savings just on electricity per year. With approximately a 15-year simple pay back,” said Gillan.
"As a municipality, we're very interested in moving towards the green initiative energy productions methods and reducing the dependence on non-renewable energy,” said Gillan, noting, "it provided us with a shovel ready engineering report to apply for the capital grants for our solar panels."
