March 2017 | Business View Magazine

192 193 Goderich, Ontario AT A GLANCE Goderich, Ontario WHAT: A town of 8,000 WHERE: On the eastern shore of Lake Huron, at the mouth of the Maitland River WEBSITE: www.goderich.ca rush. By late 1867, twelve independent salt wells dotted the Mait- land River Valley across Goderich Harbor and Lake Huron. In 1959, Sifto Canada constructed its first mine shaft, some 1,800 feet beneath the surface of the earth, with tunnels extending over four miles under Lake Huron. A second shaft became operational in 1968 and a third shaft was added in 1983. Each year, some 600 workers extract approximately 7.5 million metric tons of salt from the mine, used mainly as deicing salt which is bagged and sold to help make North America’s winter roads safer. It is also sold in bulk to manufacturers that make plastics, detergents, and other products. The Compass plant also uses mechanical evaporation to produce high-purity salt products, for use in table salt, animal licks, water softeners, and swimming pools. The company pays the province about $16,000 a year, plus royalties, for a mineral lease that expires in 2022. Parent company, Compass Minerals, a public firm based in Kansas, USA, predicts another 120 years of salt mining in Goderich. In 1999, the Town bought the port from the federal government under a divestiture program, and began a $29 million infrastruc- ture project to rebuild its break walls, river wall, and piers. That project was complet- ed in 2015 and according to Larry McCabe, Goderich’s Chief Administrative Officer, was accomplished without the use of tax dol- lars. “The user fees were lowered during this process once the town bought the port, but there were still sufficient dockage and wharf- age fees, each year, to produce a $29 million infrastructure program.” “We are now proceeding with a $16 million infilling programwhich will be completed in 2018,”he adds.“That will create about four or five acres of new land and we hope to build on that in the future.There are no tax dollars in that, either; it’s user fees from Compass Minerals and Parrish & Heimbecker (a Canadian grain company) and some other users in the port.That’s the biggest in- frastructure program over the last number of years and going on for the next two or three years.” Chip Wilson is Goderich’s Director of Opera- tions. He outlines some other recent and on- going infrastructure projects in town: “We just opened up another phase of our industrial land, which now has created approximately 26 more acres,” he reports. “The town put in our own stormwater management because we’ve always