Civil and Municipal - Jan 2024

to showcasing its diversity, while continuing to uphold its reputation as a friendly and welcoming community. HISTORY AND EVOLUTION Clarence-Rockland Mayor, Mario Zanth shares,“Back in the 1800s this was a logging town.Aman named Mr. Edwards owned the mill down by the river, and he essentially had a monopoly on pretty much everything around here.” The city of today was born out of the amalgamation of the Town of Rockland and Clarence Township in 1998 and includes the communities of Bourget, Cheney, Clarence, Clarence Creek, Hammond, Rockland, and Saint-Pascal-Baylon. Zanth continues, “We are one of the largest Francophone areas left in Ontario. We’re very proud of that. We put up Franco-Ontarian flags everywhere we go. It’s not to keep anybody out, it’s that we are very, very proud of our heritage. To be Franco Ontarian is something that is very near and dear to people’s hearts.” INFRASTRUCTURE AND INNOVATION Mayor Zanth emphasizes the importance of public- private partnerships in responsible municipal growth, noting, “The days of the taxpayer carrying the burden 100% of the time is over, there is no way that any municipality can survive by doing that anymore. So, the private-public partnerships that we have going on right now are incredibly important to make sure that our municipality grows in a vibrant and responsible way.” He shares the example of a retired train station in the Bourget community, which was sold to the city for $1 in 2014, under the stipulation that it be developed into something useful. “And we know that the second that a municipality wants to do anything infrastructure-related, the cost goes up tenfold,” relays Zanth. “What we did is, we have a private partnership now with a company that is going to invest close to $1.5 million in renovating the train station to its original state, but they also threw in a couple of things like little restaurants and little bistros, to make a little bit of a downtown core, linked and anchored to that train station, which I think is incredible.” 35 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 5, ISSUE 01 CLARENCE-ROCKLAND, ON