THUNDER BAY – City council voted unanimously to approve a ten-part human rights-based community action plan for responding to homeless encampments.
The Monday night decision followed a lengthy debate about the proposed construction of a temporary shelter village for the city’s unhoused population.
The biggest point of contention in the plan was the proposed temporary village which City Manager John Collin said would operate for 5 years, starting next summer.
Two possible sites have been identified in a report, which was offered by administration as information on Monday. No site decisions have been put to council yet.
One option at Kam River Heritage Park off Syndicate Avenue would provide space for 100 units with an estimated construction cost between $5.9 million and $6.8 million and annual operating costs between $1.5 million and $2.5 million.
The second proposed site is a vacant lot at 114 Miles St. East which could accommodate up to 80 units.
The Miles Street site would cost the city an estimated $4 million to $4.3 million with annual operating costs of $1.5 million to $2 million.
Collin noted that the temporary village project will include measures to ensure infrastructure and construction costs don't exceed a maximum budget of $5 million from the Renew Thunder Bay Reserve Fund or a tax-supported operating budget of $1.5 million.
The current plan is for the city to fund the project upfront from the reserve fund and the tax-base support while pursuing provincial and federal grants to recoup what was spent, a gamble Collins says is necessary to get the work started quickly.
Laying the groundwork for this project now means the city could have the action plan in place before spring, otherwise Collin said the city will face another summer of managing homeless encampments on municipal land.
“There's just no way around that,” Collin said.
With the ten-part human rights-based community action plan in place, he said Thunder Bay is poised for successful negotiation with higher levels of government to get additional support grants.
“The Federal government is on record as saying they will fund unique and innovative solutions to address the challenge of homelessness in addition to what they are funding to address housing,” Collin stated.
In the meantime, the action plan will also give city staff increased resources to manage the encampments growing across the city and limit encampments on municipal property to a many as three yet-to-be-proposed sites.
“If we have sufficient indoor shelter options that are accessible, and if we have designated through by-laws and all the necessary control measures, the up-to-three outdoor encampments, we will be well within our rights as a municipality, based on the current case-law, to move people along,” said Collin.
Therefore, with the action place in place, the municipality will have the means to relocate people to the yet-to-be proposed designated encampment sites.
The motion to approve the plan right away was met with some pushback from Couns. Mark Bentz, Rajni Agarwal and Albert Aiello.
Bentz asked to refer the matter to a later date so that staff and the inter-governmental affairs committee could secure outside funding before the municipality takes on the brunt of the cost.
“It's not really a fair way to tax people, and yet we're loading more social services and social housing onto the property tax base here,” Bentz said.
Agarwal stated that she had to support the referral because of the lack of advance consultation with the business community and the community at large.
“If this is the project that we need to do for our most vulnerable, I support it then. But if it's a cost to other businesses, a cost to other parties, a cost to our city for the cost of infrastructure to be torn out and thrown out in five years after the temporary is over, I'm not in support of it,” Agarwal said.
“I would like to see something that we invest be long-term and permanent and benefit our community as a whole.”
According to Collin, the Kam River Heritage Park location would cost more than the Miles Street site because they would have to install the infrastructure necessary for the temporary village, but he also stated that the city has “no intention of ripping out any infrastructure that we put in.”
“One of the advantages of Kam River Park is that we have clearly identified is that once the temporary village is no longer required, we will have infrastructure there for the revitalization of that park,” said Collin.
Agarwal stated that pushing the city’s spring deadline back by a couple of months would be cheaper in the long run because of the cost to begin a construction project in the winter.
However, Collin stated the cost would be significant if the city pushed the construction of the temporary village into the summer because the city would have to house encampment residents in indoor shelters while the project is being built.
Coun. Andrew Foulds said he saw both sides of the argument.
The municipality should not have to bear the brunt of the cost as the homelessness crisis stretches far beyond Thunder Bay’s city limits, said Foulds. But also that long-standing issues of jurisdictional battles between all levels of government have failed to meet the needs of the people governments serve.
“In the early 2000s, there were all kinds of jurisdictional battles over providing access to services to Indigenous children and no one would provide those services,” said Foulds.
“We all just fought about who was going to pay for it.”
He acknowledged that there is risk involved with the action plan and said it is unfair that Thunder Bay taxpayers would incur the cost, but said it is a risk he was willing to take.
“Although the risk is significant, boy I would be proud to be a member of a council that created the Thunder Bay protocol that every municipality wanted to emulate, not only across the province but across the country,” said Foulds
“So, I'm willing to take the risk to potentially have that opportunity.”
Bentz's referral was voted down by council three to seven paving the way for council to approve on the ten-part human rights-based community action plan.
