Dealing with its infrastructure challenges should be North Cowichan’s immediate strategic economic priority, said the municipality’s general manager of planning, development and community services.
George Farcas told council at its meeting on May 21 that the limited supply of sewer and water services to North Cowichan’s light industrial lands restricts the municipality’s ability to attract new industrial businesses and expand existing ones.
He said staff recently met with a business owner that wants to expand their industrial operation, but without the ability of the municipality to service the expansion plans, “that will be an opportunity we don’t see in North Cowichan”.
“The primary action we think council should pay immediate attention to is around water and sewer servicing,” Farcas said.
“You heard from our director of engineering just a couple of months ago around the state of infrastructure in the municipality. In our view, that’s the immediate strategic priority. We have a servicing problem in general. One of the things we’ve learned over the last couple of months is no matter where you are in the municipality, whether an industrial site or not, there is going to be servicing challenges.”
Council and staff were discussing North Cowichan’s newly adopted economic development action plan, which was prepared by Deloitte Consulting and acknowledges that one of the significant challenges and limitations the municipality is facing is its limited supply of service to light industrial lands.
After a presentation to council on infrastructure challenges by engineering director David Conway in March, CAO Ted Swabey said North Cowichan has reached the point where all of its servicing capacity has been maximized, and the municipality now needs to quickly find viable solutions and a way forward.
He said at the time that the estimated total upgrade of all North Cowichan’s servicing systems that will be needed to meet future development needs for both residential and commercial projects has been estimated at approximately $359 million.
Coun. Christopher Justice asked staff how dire the problem of servicing industrial lands is currently in North Cowichan.
Swabey said it’s so dire that there are doubts that any of the municipality’s existing industrial lots can support development at this stage.
“We know for sure that we can’t subdivide them and create more value out of the land without the upgrades that are required,” he said. “The fire flows don’t allow for development to happen that would intensify the use [of the industrial lots] to allow for a high-employment base, so I would feel uncomfortable going out and soliciting businesses to come here because we don’t have land that we can service. Until we can solve this problem, we can’t go out and honestly ask businesses to come here.”
Coun. Bruce Findlay agreed that North Cowichan’s highest economic priority should be to deal with the servicing issue as quickly as possible because it's hindering the ability to bring business and other industries to the municipality.
“Once we do get that servicing in place, promoting North Cowichan provincially, federally and internationally as a great place to live and work is critical,” he said. “The third step I think is for us to get out of the way because then the private sector can come in and take over and provide the jobs and the tax base that we’re all definitely looking for.”
