Restart provincial program to clean up 'orphaned' contaminated sites: MLA

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A Bathurst-area MLA wants to restart a program that would tap into the province’s $30-million environmental trust fund to clean up the hundreds of abandoned industrial sites that languish in New Brunswick.

Bathurst West-Beresford MLA René Legacy plans to introduce a motion to restart the “orphan site program,” which helped fund remediation efforts of contaminated sites in the province that have no owner or where the owner could not afford the work.

The program was originally funded by the province through the Environmental Trust Fund – which collected a portion of revenues from recycling bottle exchange – and the federal government. Federal funding for the program ended in 1995, and the province continued to fund the program, periodically reducing the amount of money available, until it ended in 2009.

Legacy’s motion states the program should be reinstated following “a review of its criteria and funding mechanism,” as a way to begin to address the more than 1,000 contaminated sites in the province. The exact number of those sites that are orphaned is unknown, Legacy said.

Even without federal funding, Legacy feels the province could use the more than $30 million available in the trust fund to reinstate the program in some capacity.

“They haven’t actually been able to use enough of (the money in the trust fund) every year. There’s always a surplus. And those dollars are meant to go back to communities to make our province greener,” he said.

“Why not open it up to more things that might do some good?”

The 2022 auditor general’s report revealed the province stopped tracking contaminated sites with the end of the orphan site program, and there is no government department responsible for monitoring and remediating the contaminated sites.

It says in some cases, where owners can’t afford remediation or sites are abandoned, property taxes stop being paid, leaving the properties to be dealt with by the province, either through tax sale or remediation. The delay can lead to further contamination of the sites and more costly cleanup when the remediation eventually happens.

A prime example for the need is the former Smurfit-Stone Mill site, located in downtown Bathurst, that’s been deteriorating over the past nearly 20 years.

The site closed in 2005 due to unfavourable market conditions and has changed ownership multiple times through the years. Nearly everything of value has been stripped from the site, and the most recent owner tore down some silos and successfully saw a gas station built in the former parking lot, but the rest of the work remains. The owner since passed away and was the sole proprietor of his company.

“Nobody necessarily owns the land,” Legacy said. “It’s become an orphaned site. So it’s very hard to make plans and get somebody to concretely invest without clear ownership.” 

An environmental impact assessment of the 237-acre site completed in 2021 revealed remediation would cost anywhere from $12 to $15 million, with the cleaned land suitable for a mix of commercial, residential and industrial use.

That’s money the city says it doesn’t have, and mayor and council have been working with the province to try to find a solution.

“Some departments can do some cleanup as part of a bigger project but they have no… programs to do remediation,” Legacy said.

– With files from Brunswick News