Flin Flon city council is now willing to offer fire service to individual sections of cottage country, softening its original all-or-nothing stance.
Mayor George Fontaine said Tuesday that “identifiable and full neighbourhoods” of cottagers may now approach the city to purchase fire protection.
“The fire chief’s preference would be ‘let’s protect everyone,’” Mayor Fontaine said. “But until we’re ready to do that, we will take identifiable areas that we would map out and say, ‘This area (has fire protection).’”
Examples of “identifiable areas” include the north end of Big Island and the portion of the Schist Lake subdivision near the Big Island Drive-In, among others.
Mayor Fontaine said fire protection for a neighbourhood will only happen if everyone in that area agrees to pay the city’s asking price of $300 a year.
“They’ve got to be large enough blocks (of cottages) with no breaks in between,” he said. “You can’t have one cabin (owner) sitting (among) 10 of them that says, ‘I’m not covered.’”
But Mayor Fontaine said the important thing is that the city receive $300 for every cottage in a neighbourhood – regardless of who pays.
“If there’s 10 cabins and nine people decide to pay the $3,000, that’s fine,” he said. “We don’t care where (the money) comes from (but) I’d feel pretty guilty if I was the guy in the middle (who didn’t pay).”
Until now, the city’s position had been that unless all road-accessible cottagers in the region agreed to the $300 fee, fire protection would be withheld.
Revised stance
The city’s revised stance was news to Dale Powell, an executive member of the North of 54 Cottage Owners Association.
“I’m surprised that he (Mayor Fontaine) wouldn’t have approached the cottage associations to indicate his change of approach on it,” Powell said, “because we would be more than happy to discuss how this might be able to get resolved.”
Mayor Fontaine said that while the city wants $300 from each cottager, there is a chance that they would end up paying less.
That’s because the city will approach insurance companies to recover costs from fires at any cottages that receive protection from Flin Flon.
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If there were three fires that bring insurance reimbursements of $35,000 in a year, Mayor Fontaine said as an example, then that money would be subtracted from all cottagers’ fees.
“I don’t care where the money comes from, but the money has to be there for the service,” he said.
Mayor Fontaine also clarified that cottagers would send their $300 fees to the Manitoba government, which in turn would pay the city.
“We’re not going to collect money. We have no avenue to do that and no authority to do that,” he said.
Mayor Fontaine said the city is prepared to begin fire protection from the moment it has an agreement with a cottage neighbourhood.
“As (soon as) I can get the fire department to say, ‘We can handle this’ then we’ll talk to the provincial government and say, ‘Set up a payment scheme because you’re the ones who have to collect it,’” he said.
Flin Flon stopped responding to structural fires outside its boundaries on July 1, ending a years-old practice.
Mayor Fontaine argued that it was a matter of fairness for Flin Flon taxpayers, who had long subsidized fire protection for cottage subdivisions.
The city attempted to reach a funding agreement with representatives of the cottage owners, but the talks fell apart.
On Nov. 4, a garage blaze at Schist Lake became the first major structural fire at cottage country since Flin Flon ended fire service.
The fire was extinguished on scene with the help of a pump, witnesses said.
