Citizens of Yellowknife put ConMine project in jeopardy
Yellowknife, NWT/ Canada, Con Mine is the tower in the back (source: flickr/buck82, creative commons)
Alexander Richter
23 Mar 2011
Despite availability of federal grants of $14million, residents of the city of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories in Canada, voted against the city borrowing $49 million that would have allowed the city to continue the work on the Con Mine geothermal heating project.
In a recent local vote, the “residents of Yellowknife have voted against borrowing $49 million to continue work on the proposed Con Mine Community Energy System”, that is supposed to “provide heat buildings in the downtown core using mainly geothermal energy from Con Mine.” This is reported by Canadian CTV last week.
The City of Yellowknife released the results of a referendum held on the issue Monday last week. With a turnout of 35 per cent, the vote was 1,362 against and 997 for the proposal.
Yellowknife Mayor Gordon Van Tighem says he was disappointed to see “such a worthy project halted now, especially when we have had strong interest from private sector partners and $14.1 million in federal grant funding.”
Van Tighem says the referendum results will be reviewed and future options include abandoning the project altogether or seeing if it could be done with private-sector financing.
“We know that residents were engaged in this decision process and we believe they had enough information to make an informed decision,” said Robert Long, senior administrative officer for Yellowknife. “We only hope that this outcome truly represents the desire of the whole community.”
Source: CTV
