City of Timmins State of the City 2019 – Mayor George Pirie
Press Release
January 24, 2019
Challenges and Opportunities
Welcome, Bienvenue, Wachay!
Thank you Dr. Gibbons, for the kind introduction and thank you to the Chamber for hosting this event today.
To my colleagues on council, members of the Chamber of Commerce, members of the media, invited guests; it gives me great pleasure to be here today to share with you my first State of the City address as Mayor. I want to thank you all, including the members of the City of Timmins Administration, for being here today.
I would like to thank today’s event sponsor, Northern College. As you know I am the Chairman of the Board of Governor’s with Northern and it a tremendous pleasure to work with a dedicated visionary team lead by Dr. Gibbons.
It is an honor to stand here today as the Mayor of the City of Timmins. It is a responsibility I take on with great humility and respect for the mandate granted to me by the citizens of this great city. It is a trust never to be betrayed and a duty to be executed with vision, vigor and vigilance. I stepped into this position knowing that I may not always be the most popular person in the room, nor will I be able to please every resident but I have promised to execute my responsibilities dedicated to the greater good of every resident of this city.
It has only been a few short weeks, including the Christmas holiday season since I and council were sworn in. I said at that time that this council will be committed to being the best that we can be to serve the citizens of the City of Timmins. I said we have some immediate issues to deal with and called for a warming shelter to be established to provide a safe environment for those most at risk. I said we had the leadership in the community to get this done.
A warming shelter has been established just in time I believe, and the outstanding leadership responsible for this is Brian Marks at DSSAB, Mike Miller at DSSAB, Dave Landers our CAO, the Timmins Native Friendship Centre, Living Space and the Timmins Police Services. This would not have been possible without the dedicated staff and volunteers who are always the unsung heroes doing the work getting the job done. The City extends a sincere thank you to everyone who helped.
This is a small start and there is still much more to be done, however this is a positive outcome for those residents who need our help the most and indeed for the city. Again thank you to everyone involved for working together to make this a reality.
I said those few short weeks ago that we need to have the difficult conversations on all issues and be courageous enough to make the tough decisions. The world is changing around us and Timmins is not alone in this changing world. Every other municipality of our size and larger is facing the same social issues. The challenge is the opioid crisis. The Porcupine Health Unit, serving a population of approximately 74,000 people dispensed 266,000 needles in 2018. We are not alone, Sudbury dispensed approximately 500,000. We need a safe injection site. I believe this is imperative. Why? Well when a young father and his ten year old daughter bring a 10 litre water container full of discarded needles that they picked up downtown demanding action then action I believe should be taken. This issue is severe enough that City employees are trained on how to pick needles up safely. We cannot bury our head in the sand on this. As I said communities that bury their head in the sand are doomed to mediocracy and will slowly crumble from the inside out. We cannot be one of them. Status quo is not an option.
Challenges! Tuesday morning our CAO and I gave a pre-budget presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs. We are well aware of the challenges that the Province faces. $40 million more spent every day than is taken in. Of course we all know that the Provinces challenges are our challenges. The purse strings have to be and are being tightened.
It is a fact that Municipal governments rely on provincial grants to provide basic local services and investments in infrastructure. Grants either Federal or Provincial can account for up to 20% of municipal revenues. At the provincial level the $4.2 billion transfer of funds to the municipalities make up only 5.6% of the $133.7 billion in total transfers to all recipients of transfer payments in the province. However to illustrate the magnified effect these transfers have on our budgets, the $9.6 million we receive from one fund, the $510 million Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund which is set up for equalization, northern and rural support, accounts for more than 13% of our budget. We simply cannot incur any decrease in the funding from transfer payments without increasing our taxes or decreasing our services. The quality and quantity of services we provide are largely dictated by the province. Our residential taxes are already the highest in the north and the ability of our citizens to bear more of this burden is limited.
The challenge is that although our population base has decreased our infrastructure requirements have not. The physical size of the city has not shrunk! The fact is that the population density per square kilometer has declined to 14. By way of comparison Sudbury, which is geographically larger has a population density per square kilometer of 51. However this declining base still has to carry the burden of highway downloads which saw 86.8 km of roadways downloaded to Timmins which in fact represented 80% of all highways transferred amongst the Northern Regional Hubs of Timmins, North Bay, Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Sault Ste Marie. It is worth repeating that North Bay and Sault Ste Marie saw no highway transfers. It is worth repeating that our capital asset management plans call for an investment of over $12 million this year; over $21 million in 2020; over $16 million in 2021; over $12 million in 2022; over $10 million in 2023; $1.2 million in 2024: $19.1 million in 2025 and $7.2 million in 2026.
Compounding the problem of the declining population and residential tax base is the shrinking of the industrial, commercial base as a result of the consistent success in the appeal of the MPAC assessments by this group which has seen a 50% reduction in the property tax from the large industrial mines in the area. This is a severe problem for Timmins as we will incur a 6% reduction in our tax base levy by 2021 resulting from these successful appeals.
Challenges! We have talked often about the Porcupine sewage pumping and treatment system. We know that it is vastly over budget and will require some level of debt to be added an already high debt burden in the City of Timmins, to complete the project. We as yet do not know what the go forward plan is.
We know that the Golden Manor will require a significant infusion of funds by 2024 (perhaps $80 million) to make it compliant with current ministry requirements. We know at some level this will require an additional debt load.
We do not know whether or not Glencore will be able to extend the life of the Kidd Creek Mine. We know if they are not successful the community stands to lose over $100 million in annual payroll and over $50 million in annual goods and services spend by 2022.
We do not know if we will be successful in our bid to be the site of Noront’s ferrochrome smelter.
We do know that we have a very good bid and are optimistic that we will be chosen over Sault Ste Marie. Noront has not given a definitive date on the site selection.
Our citizens know that our immediate future is uncertain. They want and deserve a council who think differently, will work together to come up with better solutions simply because there may far less financial resources available to accomplish what we need to get done. Our citizens expect us to be prudent stewards of their hard earned tax dollars and do not want us to mortgage our future.
Additionally there is angst in the community as we have just seen takeover offers made on two of our large mines.
Additionally there is concern regarding Detour who spends $165 million in local, Northern Ontario purchasing. The corporation recently went through a major restructuring of its board and Jim Gowans was named chairman. On a recent trip through Timmins Jim advised me that the company and the Moose Cree First Nation were now back at the negotiating table regarding the permitting for the West Detour extension. This is good news as this is this extension is critical for the long term viability of the operations. This asset is equivalent to approximately 50% of the value of the Ring of Fire and it is serviced largely out of Timmins.
As we know Pan American Silver has made a takeover offer for Tahoe which of course would include the Timmins West and Bell Creek Mine and Mill. The speculation is that Pan American would sell the Timmins operations. It is a given that any purchaser of these operations would not be buying them to close them down so there should be no fear of the unknown here. In fact
Tahoe will be hosting the grand opening of its’ Bell Creek facilities on the 12th of February.
Newmont has recently made a takeover offer for Goldcorp. There again is speculation in the press that Newmont would sell the Timmins assets.
I talked to Gary Goldberg the President and CEO of Newmont yesterday. Newmont does not need to sell a single asset to make this deal accretive to its shareholders. This is where we can turn this conversation to opportunities. In my view and my view alone, as none of this was discussed with Gary, I am very optimistic about this development. Newmont are great operators.
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