City, First Nations excited about development

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This article was published 28/09/2022 (1240 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon providing utility service to land being developed by a tripartite group of First Nations in Westman won’t happen soon, but could lead to larger opportunities down the road, according to the Wheat City’s planning director.

At last week’s Brandon City Council meeting, councillors voted unanimously to sign a memorandum of understanding with the RM of Elton and Keeseekoowenin, Rolling River and Waywayseecappo First Nations to explore a future service sharing agreement with a property in the RM owned by those nations.

That plot of land is located north of the Trans-Canada Highway, west of Highway 10 and south of Brandon Municipal Airport. The existing Waywayseecappo gas bar is adjacent to the land.

Those nations previously attempted to build a casino on the land, but those plans were thwarted following a dispute with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs over profit-sharing.

According to Ryan Nickel, the city’s planning and buildings department director, he became involved most recently after the three First Nations approached the city about service sharing about a month before the item appeared on the agenda for the Sept. 20 council meeting.

“There’s been a recent attempt to get the momentum started again,” he said. “That was why the First Nations partnership had reached to the City of Brandon about starting these discussions again. It seemed a logical first step to get a [memorandum of understanding] together to clarify roles and responsibilities to get things rolling on this land.”

As Nickel stated at the council meeting, the memorandum is not legally binding, but will help all the parties involved explore their options.

He said what the three First Nations are interested in the most from Brandon is access to water and wastewater utilities.

“The city does have existing connections to the airport from the city, but those connections are very limited and likely need to be replaced here in the foreseeable future,” Nickel said.

“There’s some potential for partnership here. Even if those lines are replaced, there’s still significant limitations within the broader city network downstream, so there are significant hurdles to overcome to make it work for all parties.”

With limitations to services within the city, it makes providing those services outside municipal borders even trickier to navigate.

Though Nickel said service sharing agreements are never speedy, he said at the meeting that this deal could lead to more opportunities for the city down the road.

Waywayseecappo Chief Murray Clearsky said he didn’t want to divulge too many details Tuesday, since a lot of details still had to be settled.

“It’s mainly [about] water … we’re supposed to be sharing and developing a community service well in our area on our property, and cost-sharing with the three communities as well as Elton,” he said about how talks have gone so far. “So that was kind of what was mentioned, but there’s a lot of work to do yet.”

One of the current obstacles, he said, is that the RM of Elton is currently busy preparing for its municipal election next month.

Once that’s over, “then we can proceed on something to benefit the RM as well as ourselves,” Clearsky said.

Clearsky’s colleague, Chief Norman Bone of Keeseekoowenin, said “there’s been excitement” around the development of the land.

“We’re hoping to build a town there, that’s my expression, or a city area that people can partake in,” Bone told the Sun Tuesday. “The ideas are anything from commercial-type businesses, residential areas, maybe some recreational-type areas, whatever we can fit on that property.”

He said it had been a “little bit of a journey” to set up the partnership, but it was important to make sure that any participating businesses would be successful.

“We’re all Anishinaabe from the south Riding Mountain area, and it’s been sometimes challenging … like anything else when you’re creating a partnership.”

Bone added that they’ve enjoyed the partnership with the RM of Elton and hope to do more with it going forward.

The Sun was unable to reach Elton Reeve Ross Farley or Rolling River Chief Wilfred McKay for comment on Tuesday.

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