THUNDER BAY — City of Thunder Bay officials are waiting to hear how the provincial environment ministry handles a request for a higher level of assessment of the Boulevard Lake Dam rehabilitation project.
The city hopes to call tenders for the long-delayed $7 million project by the end of the year.
It recently posted a report documenting its Schedule C Class Environmental Assessment which studied how the dam should be rehabilitated, as well as the potential environmental and social impacts of the project.
During the period for public feedback on the report—which expired Jan. 31—one party requested a Part II Order, also known as a bump-up request.
The ministry's website outlines the purpose of a Part II Order:
If you feel that significant outstanding issues have not been addressed in a class environmental assessment process and could be better addressed through an individual environmental assessment process, you can ask for a higher level of assessment. This is known as a Part II Order and anyone can make the request.
You should not make a Part II Order request to delay or stop the planning and implementation of a class environmental assessment project.
You should only make a Part II Order request when issues can’t be resolved through:
- the class environmental assessment process
- discussions with the proponent
- mediation
According to Mike Vogrig, the city's project engineer, "We don't have the documentation yet and we are unsure what the concerns are and who submitted that yet."
Vogrig said the city hopes to receive the details in the near future, noting that the province normally responds to these requests within 45 days.
The ministry, he said, will likely discuss the concerns with city officials before deciding whether or not to grant the bump-up.
"We kind of expected the request from the start. We have had them previously," Vogrig said.
He said the next steps are entirely within the purview of the ministry.
"They may have a request for us to do additional work, or they may find that the studies and the work that we've done are already comprehensive enough, and there wouldn't be any request to do anything else."
A previous EA for the project, submitted by the city in 2015, was found by the ministry to be inadequate, resulting in a protracted delay in starting rehabilitation.
The planned work includes:
- installing a redundant set of post-tensioned steel tendons in buttresses along the east side of the dam
- rehabilitating deteriorated protective concrete through patching
- replacing wooden stop logs with manually-operated mechanical gates
- widening the deck of the dam to City of Thunder Bay standard trail width
- improving lighting on the dam
Two cofferdams would be built to facilitate repairs to the upstream side of the dam, requiring the water level in Boulevard Lake to be lowered, diminishing use of the park for a year.
