Mayor Brain hopeful of positive news on Resource Benefits Alliance ambitions by year's end

Mayor Brain provided an update on the work of the
Northwest Resource Benefits Alliance at Monday's Council session

Mayor Lee Brain provided a short update on his recent travels to Prince George, delivering a short review for Prince Rupert City Council members at the Monday night Council session.

Speaking towards the end of the sixteen minute Council meeting, the Mayor spoke to some of the themes that he and other members of the Resource Benefits Association of the Northwest brought to the attention of Premier John Horgan.

The group were in Prince George for the annual BC Natural Resources forum which took place from January 27-31.

As part of his version of the Lee's Notes for the meetings Mr. Brain reviewed some of their past exchanges with the Premier over the last few years on the RBA project, observing how the Premier continues to support the initiative and would like to see it move forward.

Towards that Mr. Brain added that as a member of the steering committee they would be engaging the province further with hopes to be able to report back positive news at the end of this year towards the project.

He highlighted the various areas that the additional funding could be used towards should the RBA find success in their initiative, wrapping up his report he noted that they were very positive meetings in Prince George.

"That will be one of those initiatives that if it happens, will be huge for the Northwest for the long term future. And will see a steady source of revenue coming in for us to repair our roads and improve our parks, build more trails and to build infrastructure and to do all the wonderful things that we are trying to do to make our places more liveable"

The collective that consists of 22 municipal and regional governments with officials from around the Northwest representing their home communities, the group last updated their information stream in the fall, that following some talks with Provincial officials at the UBCM convention.

It was one year ago that the member communities divided up 100 million dollars from the province, the money at the time earmarked towards investment back into local communities.

The Mayor observed on Monday that Prince Rupert received 8.1 million dollars, though he did not indicate how the City had put that money to work over the last year.

As Mayor Brain noted in his comments from Monday night, the initiative has been a long running project, it is set to reach the six year mark later this year.

It was first introduced to the community by former Mayor Jack Mussallem in 2014, who was part of the initial groundwork to get the initiative up and running.

You can review the Mayor's comments  at the nine minute mark of the Council session.




Some past background on the Resource Benefits Alliance's work in the Northwest can be found from our archive page here.

For more items of note on the Monday session see our Council Timeline feature.

A wider overview of Council Discussion themes can be explored from our Council Discussion archive page.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.