The City of Flin Flon is hoping to learn from the City of Thompson’s most recent experience trying to access the Mining Community Reserve Fund (MCRF).
The Thompson Citizen reported Thompson city council recently received a letter from Dave Dyson, deputy minister for Growth, Enterprise and Trade stating that the City of Thompson cannot have access to the MCRF currently, as it can only be used if the balance is at least $10 million. According to Dyson, the fund does not currently meet that threshold.
The Citizen reported the MCRF currently contains $11,257,500. The $1.25 million above the threshold has already been allocated to Manitoba’s Mineral Exploration Assistance Program.
The Mining Tax Act states that when the reserve exceeds $10 million, any excess may be directed to assist in exploration projects that contribute to the welfare and employment of people residing in mining communities. The act does not state that funds may not be used for other purposes if the amount in the reserve dips below $10 million.
Earlier this month, Blaine Pedersen said the City of Thompson presented a four-year plan on how it would spend money from the fund, and said the government views that plan as being inadequate, taking into consideration the amount of layoffs taking place at Vale Manitoba Operations.
Mayor Cal Huntley spoke to the City of Flin Flon’s upcoming proposal for MCRF funding during the June 19 meeting of council.
“Ours is still a little bit of a work in progress, because we’re not going to go down the road [Thompson] went down,” said Huntley, adding the response to Thompson is based on an interpretation the city doesn’t agree with.
“Our interpretation and our opinions … lead us to believe you can go below [$10 million] and the actual mining reserve fund itself wasn’t specifically geared to fund for prospecting and exploration – that was supposed to come out of other revenues. We want other revenues to fund that.”
Huntley said the city has a draft proposal in place, but that details around seniors’ housing in the proposal have changed.
“We originally considered trying to access dollars for the Flin Flon Hotel to modify that into seniors’ housing,” said Huntley.
“We did a preliminary with our director of works and operations … and the dollars led you to believe it would be better to build new. We’re in the process of rejiggering the proposal around the seniors’ housing, which we believe is a significant leg for this community to move forward on, because there is going to be a large portion of our community that’s retirees that are going to live here, and we need the appropriate housing.”
Huntley said the city will pursue the MCRF to whatever degree it can.
“If they say, ‘That’s it,’ we’re not going to take them to the Supreme Court over it or anything like that, but we do believe there should be accessibility.”
“We’ve started it. They’re expecting a proposal from us at some point of time, it’s just we’re trying to learn from the Thompson experience before we can actually submit the proposal so we’ve dotted our Is and crossed our Ts.”
