A rebuilt Babine Forest Products means a stable tax base for the municipality of Burns Lake.
It is is one of the few towns in the region that has almost zero industrial taxation income, despite it being the hub community for thousands of rural dwellers all over the Lakes District. Its mills and factories are spread around the area, but all outside town limits. Babine's mill site is on a parcel of First Nations land about 20 minutes drive east of the municipal boundaries.
As a local government, Burns Lake has to rely has commercial and residential tax activity alone to pay for its programs and infrastructure. The announcement of a Babine rebuild was a relief to mayor Luke Strimbold because it gave more certainty to those two sectors.
"We don't collect any taxes from the mill, but our home assessments will be affected in a positive way by the mill rebuild, people won't have to move away like many were considering if the mill was gone for good, and those who worked at Babine and within the forest industry's economic system, they can keep their house and pay their bills and take part in the community," Strimbold said.
The shallowness of their tax base has impeded Burns Lake's ability to build the kind of town the residents there want. For decades, a strong call for a pool and recreation centre has been heard from within the community, but successive town councils simply couldn't afford it.
The Lakes District was in a crisis situation when their medical professionals relocated and retired, with no one willing to step in and fill the empty shoes until a concerted effort was made with the help of the provincial government.
Having no industrial tax income makes building the structures for recruitment and retention more difficult, said Strimbold. Other towns have big advantages when mills and factories are within their respective municipality's borders.
However, the provincial government spent time in the community with a team of advisory economic development officers, municipal leaders like Strimbold, First Nations representatives, and others from within the Lakes District and rendered the situation down to a few key projects. These will be legacies from the disaster that have positive impacts on the future of the town, even though the tax base is largely unchanged.
"The decision to rebuild the mill is good news for the economic future of Burns Lake," said Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training and Responsible for Labour Pat Bell who, with Burns Lake's MLA John Rustad, was among the prime contacts with Victoria. "Until the mill is rebuilt, my ministry will continue to provide economic support to the community. Since the mill fire, we've been able to accelerate $17.4 million in investments to support job creation and community recovery."
The projects include a new hospital, for which the winter site-preparation was completed on Tuesday; a new community recreation centre (still without a pool, however) attached to the town's hockey rink, curling rink, and main municipal park (the Request For Proposals is scheduled to go out to the construction industry in February); and some downtown revitalization paving. All are slated for this coming spring, as is the start of main construction on the Babine mill site.
Strimbold also said the provincial government had invested a lot of human resources from their forestry office to find enough standing timber in the area to keep the mill cutting lumber sustainably . A big part of that will be trees from Burns Lake's community forest license, which is being revamped for the sake of the Babine equations.
"We need to continue developing the log supply agreements on behalf of the community forest, and with other license holders in our community. That's the biggest part," said Strimbold. "The Ministry of Forests still needs to determine where the cuts will be located for the new community forest. I know the ministry has been working very hard on this, dedicating several local staff to work on this issue, but I am not aware of any specific sites that have been picked out."
