THUNDER BAY -- City officials left the Thunder Bay Event and Convention Centre file at home when they met with provincial ministers at the Ontario Good Roads Association annual conference in Toronto this week but the head of the delegation insists the $114-million proposal is "still on the books."
Intergovernmental Affairs Committee chairman and Coun. Joe Virdiramo said the city is considering changes to its Event Centre plans in order to make it attractive to the federal and provincial governments, whose representatives stated in 2016 the proposal meets no existing program criteria.
"It's still on the books. We haven't forgotten about it," Virdiramo said.
"We're doing what we said we were going to do. We said if the province and the feds come to the table then we'll move ahead. They have not come to the table at this time. We're looking at the second generation of funding that's going to be announced and we'll go from there."
Virdiramo and his team are changing their approach to lobbying for large infrastructure projects such as the Event Centre and the proposed $33-million Thunder Bay Art Gallery on the waterfront.
"We felt we'd get more mileage if we had a separate meeting and we'll try to arrange those and talk specifically with those people involved in government," he said.
The city is also revising its approach to the $20.1-million nest egg it developed for major projects known as the Renew Thunder Bay fund. During budget deliberations last month, council voted to draw $1.7 million from the fund for infrastructure and programs instead of having those expenses fall on the municipal levy. It was a move council rejected during its 2016 budget deliberations.
Virdiramo anticipates the move won't become a trend and council will vote to continuing building the fund in the future.
"We have to get infrastructure things done in this city. We have to get our roads fixed. We have to do all those things," he said. "Yes, we did take money out of Renew Thunder Bay but our plan in the future is to put money back in Renew Thunder Bay and not let that fund be so depleted that it's no longer there."
Thunder Bay District Jail
There was one infrastructure priority the delegation presented to provincial ministers: a replacement for the Thunder Bay District Jail.
The local jail made national headlines in 2015 when a riot tore apart its third floor while a corrections worker was taken hostage, then again last year when inmate Adam Capay was found to have spent four years in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Inmate Philip Robert Crosby escaped that same year in an incident staff said could have been prevented.
The century-old building's replacement has been an inquest recommendation and faced the scorn of organized labour, as well as representatives of both the Progressive Conservative and New Democratic parties.
Virdiramo said ministers greeted the topic with a smile but he didn't want to interpret their intentions on what he called a very serious issue.
"These are people who are under remand," Virdiramo said. "They haven't even gone to trial and they're living in conditions they shouldn't be living in. We made that quite clear to the minister, quite seriously."
