Frizzell Set to Lobby for PG’s Infrastructure Needs
Prince George, B.C. – Municipal leaders across Canada have united behind a plan to ensure that federal infrastructure dollars are spread evenly across Canada.
Prince George City Councillor Garth Frizzell, a board member with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), says the plan was agreed upon at their most recent board meeting last week in Ontario.
Garth Frizzell
“With the announcement of Phase 2 ($48 billion) of the federal infrastructure fund, we wanted to make sure that we had a combined voice and that we were going to be saying the same things as we go into Ottawa (for meetings) in November. It was unanimous, we’re all on the same page.”
And just how might Prince George benefit from phase 2 funding?
“It’s not sexy, it’s fairly boring, but roads, water and sewer funding. We can’t over emphasize it enough. We’ve seen with things like the Willow Cale challenges that we hit this last year, that climate change and adapting to it is going to be expensive,” he says.
“We had sink holes only a few years ago in Prince George and it’s just like communities all around the world, we want to have that predictable access to infrastructure funding.”
Frizzell says board members also plan to lobby the federal government to move forward on strategic investments in transit and green infrastructure.
He says they will also urge strong action on the housing crisis and to “bolster rural Canada with an enhanced Small Communities Fund.”
Comments
Garth can you please define what you mean by climate change?
Good on you guys . The insurance companies world wide have climate change as the most problematic to their business as they cited as the last G-20 meeting . It is also seen as the biggest problem for the Pentagon.
The only real serious sinkhole in Prince George is the sinkhole at City Hall where we keep throwing in money and it keeps disappearing.
I think one of the priorities for PG should be the 40-year long completion of the last half kilometre of Ospika to highway 16. Ospika being the main cross city connector in PG should have the last stretch to the largest concentration of shopping in the city.
This would alleviate the pressure on Peden Hill and the Domano intersection. A huge safety hazard of people leaving Walmart and cutting across two lanes of highway traffic to turn left at Tyner would be solved.
The city could pay for the Ospika connection and the Feds pay for the overpass of the trans Canada. Then use the vacant land along Ospika to enable non-profit low income housing for walking distance housing for low income workers in the retail sector, as well as good bus access to the university and college.
I am not sure how much more traffic Peden Hill can handle… But if we can get federal funding than this should be high up on the priority list IMO.
Seamutt you get this article was not written by Garth…right? He’s not going to answer you on here.
How about finish painting the primer blotched bridge that is heading south thru the BCR site. It looks like it was a project someone walked away from uncompleted years ago. I doubt we would see that in the lower mainland or Kelowna.
I always thought that it was camouflage in case of an airstrike.
I just did a quick calculation of how much of that $48 billion should accrue to the population of the City of Prince George.
Using a city population of 75,000 and a country population of 36.3 million we should get $99,173,533.
Over how many years is this $48 billion going to be stretched? the 3 or so years that this government is going to be assured it will be in power after any money is released?
I think $33 million per year for 3 years will advance infrastructure maintenance quite a bit.
Why have we not got more info on this money? Can we get some sort of a goal for the Councillor of how much he is shooting to obtain? Just a ballpark figure would be nice.
“We’ve seen with things like the Willow Cale challenges that we hit this last year”
The real challenge is to inspect such infrastructure as roads properly and maintain sideslopes and culverts properly, then situations like that will be much rarer
So, doing a bit of exploration, I discover that the phase2 portion is actually to be budgeted over an 8 year period.
That then works out to roughly $11 million a year for the population within the City limits. Given that, there are no guarantees beyond the first 3 years. So, we need to grab as much of that money to front-end load the dollars.
This needs to be monitored by those who are interested in this community and this region and our MPs need to be in place to support us on getting an equity of this money based on the proportion of our population.
And we have to remember that a similar equal portion needs to be provided to the regional district and communities to the south and north which are represented by our MPs.
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