On Wednesday, Feb. 10, the Town of Fort Frances published a letter that indicated the town’s taxpayers would not foot the bill for the Town’s drawn out legal dispute over the east end area known as Point Park.
While MPP Greg Rickford and MP Marcus Powlowski were able to lobby their respective government branches to waive the costs awarded to the Crown and provincial government, remaining was the costs owed to Agency One which amount to over $1.5 million which the town said “did not impact the taxes paid by the Fort Frances taxpayers.”
In a follow up interview Mayor Andrew Hallikas confirmed that the funds were paid out of the Town’s reserves.
“Every municipality puts money away for contingencies,” the mayor said.
“So it’s coming from our reserves.”
The mayor says he’s been working on improved relationships with area First Nations since he took office.
“This is something that I’ve actually worked on for my entire term, so I do want to say how pleased I am to put this litigation behind us and close that chapter,” Hallikas said.
“That litigation had been dragging on for 30 years, and it was definitely affecting the relationship that we had with our friends and neighbours in Agency One. The town of Fort Frances is committed to reconciliation, and toward that end, we have an indigenous advisory committee that’s been working really hard, for the past while. on putting together a reconciliation policy, and we have a draft policy now. We put it out to the community. It’s been on our social media. We’ve also reached out to local First Nations for their input, and in particular, we’ve reached out to Agency One. We really want to have input from Couchiching, Naicatchewenin, Mitaanjigamiing, and Nigigoonsiminikaaning, because they’re the First Nations closest to us.”
Hallikas also noted that there are many residents of Fort Frances with ties to the area First Nations as well.
“They’re our friends and neighbours, and we want to move forward with them, not just towards reconciling, but in true cooperation and partnership for the better of all, I think by working together, it improves local community life in so many ways,” he said.
“I think people need to remember that about 30 per cent of Fort Frances residents are Indigenous, so it’s really, really important that we do have a good working relationship with our Indigenous friends and neighbours, and that we value indigenous culture, Indigenous contributions to society, which are great.”
To this point the Town has still been taking care of Point Park in an arrangement with Agency One which sees the Town collect the income from the campground located at the site, Hallikas says.
“Agency One has been extremely gracious throughout this whole culmination of the court case,” he said.
“I think you probably saw the media release they put out shortly after the decision came down, and we responded in kind, and we’ve been working very, very closely with them. We’ve been maintaining the park for them, but in return, they’ve granted us the revenue from the campers at the park. So it kind of works out in a wash. We’ve also helped them when they’ve had events out there, and they have graciously left the park open for the use of everyone, so anybody can go up there, as long as they treat their property with respect. We have a lot of really good cooperation going back and forth. There’s no written agreement, but it’s informal, we pick up the phone and talk to them, they pick up the phone and talk to us. And I really like that good two-way communication, and I want to see more of it.”
