Mayor Wayne Redekop, May 14, 2026, Volume 7, Issue 18
Recently, I have commented on the importance of data when governments at all levels are making decisions. Data allow the government to identify issues that need to be addressed, resources required to respond to those issues, the effectiveness of that response and how well the residents, in the case of a local government, are being served.
The Town of Fort Erie employs a range of studies and master plans to inform the decisions that Council makes. The Town’s annual budget is connected to the needs identified in those various studies and master plans which cover every aspect of Town operations: sanitary sewage capacity, condition of facilities, roads condition, reserve and debt balances, investments, drainage and ditching, staff compliment and so forth. Council’s Strategic Plan identifies the six over-riding objectives that Council focuses on during this term of office: sustainable, reliable access to local health care; quality of life and well-being; sustainable and managed growth; economic prosperity and diversification; environmental and climate change resiliency; comprehensive housing options. These pillars are fundamental to Council’s vision for the future of our community and drive the work of the Town administration.
The ability of Fort Erie to accommodate growth, whether residential or industrial, depends on our infrastructure: its capacity, its condition and its location. A major challenge for Fort Erie is its geographic size and the dispersal of our urban centres across that vast geography. Maintaining a road or water/wastewater system is far easier for a compact municipality or one that has a larger population connected to the utility service. Fortunately for our residents, the Town of Fort Erie has been investing in our infrastructure for nearly 15 years by allocating a portion of our annual budget to infrastructure renewal, something that only recently other municipalities have begun to copy. Despite those efforts, there are still significant future costs to maintaining our infrastructure, costs that cannot be met by municipalities without assistance from the provincial and federal governments.
The greatest impediment to growth in Fort Erie is wastewater capacity. Fort Erie is one of two municipalities in Niagara that is served only by wastewater treatment plants that are located within our town, and that serve no other municipality. The wastewater system is also made up of local and regional trunk lines and pumping stations. While there is capacity for growth at our treatment plants, some of the pumping stations are subject to surcharge conditions when we experience extreme wet weather, and the lines are subject to infiltration by groundwater, illegal connections, and circulation of water from parks, arenas and manufacturing uses that do not require treatment but nonetheless flow through our system. Study and data allow the municipality to isolate areas where action can reduce those inflows, thus reducing the pressure on our system and providing more capacity without expanding any of the infrastructure. For example, last year Fort Erie received an award at the annual Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative conference in Milwaukee for a project that relined storm water catch basins to reduce the potential inflow of groundwater into the sanitary sewage system. The savings are impressive and permit the recovery of costs incurred for the work within 4 years. Those savings can then be reinvested in further work to tighten up the system, which results in further savings, extended system capacity and removal of sewage overflow incidents, thus protecting our source water. There are other projects that the Town is working on to increase the efficiency of our wastewater system and other operations to better serve our residents and businesses.
