“There’s just a large number of really active participants in promoting our community and making our community successful,” he summarizes. INCENTIVES AND INFRASTRUCTURE Chetwynd offers various incentives to attract new businesses, including tax incentives for developments exceeding a million dollars and $5000 facade improvement grants for existing businesses. “We also have a lot of capital projects that are designed around promoting business,” McLain details. “We’re doing a revitalization in our downtown core where we’re redoing water lines, and repaving. We put in LED streetlights last year, we’ve got a nice Christmas tree that plays music, and we’re adding a bike lane.” Chetwynd is also investing heavily in infrastructure, with projects such as a $5 million regional library recently completed. McLain expands,“It’s a beautiful, huge structure, and we’re quite proud of it. It ties in nicely with our rec center and an outdoor spray park that we put in a couple of years ago. We will end up with a recreational hub in the center of town, where we have free activities, all the way up to swimming and a fitness center and the library- pretty much anything you’d want for recreation and culture at your fingertips.” Recently, the municipality has partnered with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) to secure cost savings on asphalt, enabling significant street paving projects. “We’ve paved more of our sidewalks and walking trails. So now our walking trails are paved from basically from one end of town to the other, which helps us promote accessibility for all of our residents,” McLain relays. Last year, Chetwynd accessed over $3 million in grant funding for infrastructure repairs, enabling the replacement of sewer and water mains, lift stations, and paving.The spray park and an indoor playground at the Rec Center were also fully grant-funded. “We’re out there aggressively getting the funding and helping our citizens. This is partly because it is a remote area, and we are the regional center,” McLain asserts. The biggest ongoing project is a new fire hall, currently in the design phase, necessitated by a 133 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 05, ISSUE 08 CHETWYND, BC
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