The cost of restoring contaminated city lots is a province-wide concern for municipalities. A spokesperson for the provincial government at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention told delegates to consider Prince George's example.
These sites, commonly called brownfields, are a bane for municipalities trying to develop areas that might have one. They are places where industrial activity has left a contamination footprint, usually soil toxins. They can be large parcels like a former mill, or small like a former gas station. They tend, however, to be on prime development land, often waterfront or corner lots.
They are expensive to fix, requiring large amounts of soil to be removed or somehow remediated. The discussion at the UBCM meetings centred on how difficult it is for municipal governments to afford the bill themselves, when there are so many other things for local government to pay for, but how reluctant private sector developers were to buy and fix up such land when it was cheaper to invest in other property.
"It's the gift that keeps on costing taxpayers," said Pat Deakin, the economic development officer for the City of Port Alberni, speaking at the Whistler event. "One of the things that concerned me (in Port Alberni) was about 95 per cent of our waterfront was given over to industrial users. Their footprint was shrinking, there were these excess lands, (but) we knew it was going to be expensive and time consuming to rehabilitate those lands."
Prince George's industrial history, combined with the attrition of industrial users downtown, has left B.C.'s northern capital in much the same situation. Vacant lots have already been sitting unattended for years waiting for someone to clean the dirt.
There are provincial envelopes of money, grants, earmarked for projects like that but Deakin said even their highly researched proposal, with plenty of redevelopment potential, took two tries to get any provincial money. Even then, it took the financial contribution of their port authority, which had a vested interest anyway, the municipality argued, to show enough local support to attract the provincial funding.
One delegates asked if some kind of tax incentives or other incentives could be implemented for landowners surrounding a brownfield, if they kicked in some backing to remediate a contaminated lot in their midst, since this would likely spur new investment in that spot and boost the fortunes of the whole area in question.
"I think we might want to look at Prince George and what they are proposing," said Ginnie Holden, from the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands department of brownfield implementation. "(Rather than lot by lot), what Prince George and Maple Ridge are considering is covering a large portion of their downtown under one revitalization tax exemption, not just one property. These municipalities are trying to do something with a wide swath."
Brownfields are only one part of this. These contaminated sites have been on the Prince George municipal radar for years. Former councillor Cliff Dezell reported back to the local council table on this topic back in 2004 from a session of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The city has included this as a priority for the past several years running in the municipal annual report, and the spate of floods in recent years has brought it up as another concern as well.
"There are many brownfield/contaminated sites in the floodplain," said the Flood Risk and Control Solutions report of 2009, in consideration of building higher roads and dikes along the riverbanks. "Blockage of flood waters from these areas would have an environmental benefit with reduced water contamination."
There is no sign yet of oft contemplated inventory of Prince George brownfields or a plan to get them back into public use.
