BY NICK STEWART
Efforts to convince businesses to set up shop in the City of North Bay will be significantly enhanced through a series of recent agreements with the Department of National Defence and various city departments, according to Mayor Vic Fedeli.
Fedeli, who was elected to his second term last fall, recently announced the city would not be pursuing an agreement with Department of National Defence (DND) to take over services and maintenance at the DND base.
The deal, set out in a letter of understanding signed in 1998, would have found the city paying for the base’s services and building maintenance in exchange for a guarantee that it would remain fully operational for 20 years. This would have cost the city approximately $4 million per year, and would have proved disastrous for its financial future, Fedeli says.
“The $4 million a year would just about bankrupt the city. We would have had to raise taxes by eight per cent every year to pay for it, which would put us out of the ballpark to try and attract industry when we have an extra cost like that.”
As Canadian Forces Base North Bay is one of the city’s top 10 employers with 680 personnel, the need to preserve jobs likely sparked the deal eight years ago, he says. However, as the DND spent $125 million in 2006 to build and outfit additional facilities, Fedeli says he is confident the base will remain open for quite some time, and that the deal is no longer needed.
In the months following the November municipal election, multi-year labour deals have been signed between the city and regional police services as well as North Bay Hydro. With these matters settled, city council is free to focus its attention on business attraction and its promotion of the city as a potential high-tech haven.
“That lets us focus on the good things without having to be attentive to the labour aspect,” Fedeli says. “We’ve got many high-tech companies already here, whether it’s in hardware, software or servicing, so we’ve got a good base.
North Bay has also got the right proximity to Toronto. There’s only so many kilometres you can be away from Toronto and still have the same data transmission capability, and we fall within that realm, so we really feel that we’re well poised.”
As an example of related efforts, Fedeli points to the proposed plan to transform the DND’s former NORAD underground bunker into a data storage facility. However, the city’s plan to leverage the site must wait on a six-month analysis by the DND as to whether or not they wish to divest themselves of the facility.
Although 2007 is still young, he says that efforts to entice businesses to come to North Bay have already begun to bear fruit, with one or two major retail chains due to announce their arrival in Northgate Square in the coming months.
The sparsely populated North Bay Mall is also undergoing renovations and is expected to host a new Hart department store by the end of 2007.
With a number of similar success stories throughout the last six years, Fedeli says he fully expects the Canadian census results due to be announced on March 13, will be positive for North Bay. The last census, published in 2001, found the city with a population of 52,771, representing a 10-year trend of a shrinking population. Census results in 1991 found the city’s population to be 55,405, which dipped to 54,332 in 1996.
“We fully expect our population sign to go up. This really is a city on the go and on the grow.”
