Town of Port Hawkesbury

 Port Hawkesbury mayor Billy Joe MacLean likes to tell the story about the delegation from Kapuskasing, Ontario. 

He was showing some guests from Kapuskasing around the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre, a state-of-the-art facility that includes an arena, fitness centre, meeting and conference facilities, concert hall, art gallery, retail space, municipal offices, racquetball courts, and a walking track. The civic centre, completed five years ago, is also a “green” building, using technologies such as natural lighting in the arena.
 
The guests asked what the facility had cost. When they heard the figure – 18 million dollars – they replied that they would never be able to build a similar facility at home, since Kapuskasing only has a population of 12,000 people.
 
Proudly, Mayor MacLean replied, ‘That’s three times the population that we have.’
 
“They were astounded when they heard the amount of people that did it,” he says. “It was all the volunteers, the organizations, the people that put money on the table. We had arranged six million dollars of our own money, then the province came through with their third, and the feds with theirs. And that’s how it was done.”
 
That can-do spirit pervades all of the many infrastructure projects in Port Hawkesbury, a town of 3,500 people on the Strait of Canso.
 
Port Hawkesbury truly does have an impressive array of services and amenities, says John Ouellette, the president of the Strait Area Chamber of Commerce. Ouellette says that he personally knows newcomers to the town who have been floored by “the fact that there is a pool, a library, a YMCA, a new arena. There are lots of arts and cultural activities in the area,” he says. “It’s always great to hear that somebody arrives here and is pleasantly surprised at what’s available to them.”
 
It’s good for business, Ouellette says, because infrastructure is a key part of attracting and retaining the kind of business talent that Port Hawkesbury needs.
 
“We recognize that our municipal governments are often challenged to meet those types of requirements, and I think that Port Hawkesbury has done a great job in building up the kind of infrastructure that makes a community a great place to live and work,” he says.
 
Billy Joe MacLean agrees. He says that many small towns are striving to find a way to keep their population steady and their young people engaged, and that Port Hawkesbury has had a measure of success in this. Although there has been some out migration since the last census, Mayor MacLean says that overall he believes the population is holding steady.
 
“If we’re going to have a chance at all of keeping our growth, keeping our young people and keeping our retirement people, I think it has to be an agreement between the three levels of government to provide the necessary level of amenities,” he says.
 
Other recent infrastructure improvements include road work, improvements to baseball and soccer fields, and a new saltwater treatment system for the Strait Area Pool, which is exciting for Coline MacEachern, the pool director. The 25-metre pool serves thousands of people from Port Hawkesbury and the surrounding area. There have been many upgrades over the past few years, including the saltwater system, which opened September 2009. The salt water is more allergy-friendly than the old chlorination system, making the pool useable by more people.
 
“We’ve got a great facility and we could probably increase our numbers if more people were actually enjoying the facility,” MacEachern says. “Our facility is wonderful. The actual pool itself has been in existence for 30 years, but with all our new revisions, we’re maintaining and we’re moving forward. It feels like we’re still in a new pool!”
 
Still other projects are the one-year-old wastewater treatment plant, a secondary treatment system that can turn effluent into what looks like a clean glass of water. The town has even been investigating the feasibility of building a wind turbine to hook into the provincial grid and sell power to generate money for the town.
 
“It’s kind of at the pie in the sky stage right now,” says Jim Davis, the acting chief administrative officer and financial director of the town, but he agrees that it’s an exciting project on the horizon: “Although actually, it’s on the hill,” he jokes.
 
Port Hawkesbury has so many projects on the go that its facilities are well beyond the scope of most other towns its size. Mayor MacLean believes that this is crucial to seniors, children, and families, and that Port Hawkesbury will continue to look for innovative ways to serve the 3,500 people in the community.
 
“Everybody gets the same sort of look in terms of what can we provide to have the best quality of life for all categories,” he says.