MLAs accuse province of trying to escape cleanup of longtime Bathurst 'eyesore'

For more than a decade, a former mill site in northern New Brunswick has gone neglected, required environmental work hasn't been completed, and provincial property taxes remain outstanding.

Now some MLAs are calling on the provincial government to clean up the former Smurfit-Stone pulp and paper mill property in Bathurst, and subject it to a tax sale after 12 years of broken promises by developers.

Green Party Leader David Coon said if the the property were put up for a tax sale, the province would have to take on liability for any contamination.

"And unfortunately and irresponsibly, they have been refusing to do that," he said.

The Bathurst site is the most significant example of properties left to languish for years because the province hasn't acted, Coon said.

"The taxes build up, the province won't do what it normally does, which is put it up for tax sale because of the environmental liability, and it won't clean it up to enable them to sell it for tax sale.

"So the property just sits there as a, as kind of an abandoned property and gets, you know, it's, it's an eyesore. It's a, it's a potential source of contamination for the surrounding area."

Once the home of Consolidated Bathurst, a longtime employer in the city, the mill was taken over by Smurfit-Stone, which closed it in 2005, throwing 270 people out of work.

In 2010, Bathurst Redevelopment Inc., a Canadian subsidiary of Illinois-based Green Investment Group, bought the property.

The Green Investment Group promised a "green cleanup," but the site was only stripped of valuable metals and equipment and left in disrepair, according to government officials.

In 2016, a judge ordered the company to pay $150,000 for failure to comply with a ministerial order to clean up the property.

Around the same time, Bathurst Redevelopment Inc. transferred the property to Raymond Robichaud, a businessman from Bouctouche for $1. Robichaud, in January 2016, promised to clean up the site in order to build luxury condominiums and a strip mall.

At the time, the province waived $1 million owed in property taxes, so long as Robichaud stuck to his commitment to rehabilitate and develop the site.

However, two years went by with little progress, prompting former Bathurst mayor Paolo Fongemie to call on the province to seize the site and clean it up itself.