Nov-2017

234 235 Sombra and Moore Townships came together and were renamed to reflect the fact that we shared the St. Clair River.We have a two-tier governing system–our local government, and the upper tier which is Lambton County. Sarnia (pop. 75,000) is the largest of 11 mu- nicipalities of the County. “St. Clair Township is comprised of the villages of Sombra, Corunna, Port Lambton, Brigden,Mooretown, Courtright, andWil- kesport.All but two are along the St. Clair riv- er.The municipality owns 8 km. of riverfront that includes 11 provincial parks and passive parks, as well as campgrounds, and several boat launch areas. Because of that, tourism is a major factor. “We also have a fantastic waterfront trail that links our villages, the St. Clair River parks, and connects to the County and Canada-wide trail systems. It took 19 years to create and we just finished.” BVM: How are you set up, transporta- tion-wise and land-wise, for industry? MAYOR ARNOLD: “Kings Hwy 40 con- nects to the 402,which goes across the Blue Water Bridge into the Point Edward/Sarnia area and down into Chatham,where it meets the 401.And the St. Clair River, itself, is an active transportation hub with facilities for large vessels to dock.The Shell dock can handle two, 1,000-ft. freighters for loading and unloading.” BVM: What industries drive your economy? RODEY: “We are home to many large industries–Shell Nova has three ethanol manufacturing facilities here; Suncor has the largest ethanol facility in Canada here; CF Industries is a major player in agricultural chemicals.We also have numerous busi- nesses that do machine shop work,welding and cutting, and building modules. LamSar Inc. has a facility in Sarnia and put another one here with the goal of producing industrial modules to ship world- wide.We also have two large solar farms (300 and 350 acres), so we do embrace green energy. “The industrial footprint is very small, compared to the agricultural footprint–82 percent of our total land mass is agricultural land and forest cover.Today, it’s not unusual to be farming 1000 to 6000 acres. The old 200-acre family farm is prettymuch gone, just because of the price of equipment.” MAYOR ARNOLD: “Our industrial park is 85-90 percent full,with only a few smaller parcels available. We aren’t looking at adding more to it right now be- cause we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves in growth.We already have between seven and eight thousand acres zoned industrial for people wanting to do heavy industrial development.The local folks looking at expansion know this community is all ready to go for them. “One of the power plants fromMississauga came here because we are quite knowledgeable about energy, and able to tie them into the U.S. and other parts of Canada.They just finished that build about eight months ago. Gas-fired energy producing plants – Greenfield Energy Centre and Greenfield South Power Corporation–were part of the deal when the Lambton Generating Station shut down, and En- bridge also has a gas distribution and compression hub here. “Unique to this community are vast underground caverns of porous rock, perfect for storing and re- trieving hydrocarbons.That’s another reason many industrial facilities are interested in locating in the Township. In fact, salt brine is processed out of old oil and gas wells in St. Clair Township and Lambton County, and we ship it through a series of pipelines to Michigan. ST. CLAIR TOWNSHIP, ONTARIO