The City says they’re frustrated by constant costs coming from McLean Mill and they want more federal involvement in funding the National Historic Site.
Earlier this month, an oil leak was discovered that will cost upwards of $100,000 to clean up.
Now, the City has been ordered to ban all commercial activities on the site because the mill is on an Agricultural Land Reserve.
At yesterday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Sharie Minions showed her frustration.
“This is frankly far too much of our focus and has been for way too many years,” she said. “This was supposed to make millions of dollars but has instead cost millions of dollars. If there’s no commercial operations then McLean Mill is done.”
Minions said she doesn’t even understand how the Agriculral Land Commission would come to claim land surrounding a mill, but now the city will have to expend staff time to remove the restrictive designation from the property.
“This specific site, it does not make sense for it to be in the Agricultural Land Reserve,” she said. “We know because of it’s former use as an industrial site, there are significant challenges if anyone ever wanted to use it for farming, and there’s no expectation that we ever will use it for farming so it certainly does make sense to make an application to take it out of the Agricultural Land Reserve but I feel that we need to know what the cost of that process is going to be before we commit to whether or not we’re going to do that.”
Minions said she’s worried the ALC will want compensation for the loss of ALR lands, and the city will be forced to spend another year of staff time dealing with the issue.
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