CBS looking for $1.5 M to protect breakwater from climate change
By Craig Westcott / July 21, 2023
The Town of CBS is looking for federal help in tackling a $15.5 million effort to protect the Long Pond breakwater from further erosion.
Deputy Mayor and finance committee chairperson Andrea Gosse made the motion Tuesday to apply to Ottawa under the Disaster Mitigation Fund.
If approved, Ottawa would cover 40 per cent of the cost with the rest falling to CBS, Gosse explained.
“This funding program allows nine years to complete the project with a funding expiry date of December 31, 2032,” she added. “This is just an application under the program for funding. As we all know, we had breaching events in Long Pond Harbour in 2020 and 2021 and from that council engaged CBCL Consultants to do a coastal engineering assessment of Long Pond. That report was made available to us last fall and CBCL came in and presented that report to us and made recommendations for the long term for Long Pond Harbour… So, over the nine years, if successful, this will help us to implement some or all of the recommendations out of that report. It will just be a process so that we will be proactive looking after our harbour.”
Mayor Darrin Bent allowed council would like to see many of the recommendations implemented.
“To get some money through this fund would be fantastic,” he said. “And of course, it’s over nine years to be able to fund it at 60 per cent. Sixty per cent funding is not ideal for a municipality, however when you’re talking about this amount of money, the importance of what we could do with it and the length of time it’s stretched over makes it palatable. We’ll see what happens, it is just an application. The other thing I want to say is that when we do applications like this… and this amount of money, well (some) people will say, ‘This could be spent on something else.’ The only thing is we don’t have the option to spend it on something else. We either get it to spend it on this, because if we do get it and we don’t spend it on this, it’s lost. It’s not like we can move it (to another project). So, it’s important to note that a lot of these programs started by either the federal or the provincial government are specific to certain projects and you can’t just move it around… Sometimes there are other things we’d rather spend the money on, but it’s still better to do what you can do. We never like to turn away free money, that’s the way I look at it.”
Councillor-at-Large Joshua Barrett argued this is yet another example of how the Town is facing increased costs because of climate change.
“It’s often hard to provide a dollar figure on that,” he said. “But this is a dollar figure we can associate with – protecting our coastline, and it’s not cheap. But it just goes to show this big pending issue that is coming for us, and I think this proposal reiterates our desire to be prepared for those changes and to try to make our community more resilient to these realities that our town is facing.