Waiting for the development
Year after government buyout, stakeholders looking for development at Slemon Park
A year after becoming a Crown Corporation, Summerside area stakeholders are eager for promised development at Slemon Park.
The former Royal Canadian Air Force base on the outskirts of the City of Summerside has been an aerospace and industrial hub since shortly after it was decommissioned as a military base in the 1990s.
The expansive property was owned for almost 30 years by a partnership of interests, most of which were private businesses. The province was also a minority shareholder under the previous structure, but announced last year that it had spent $2.39 million to buy out its partners.
The local business community and the city of Summerside applauded the action. There had been precious little infrastructure money spent on Slemon Park in the past 20 years and the value of the asset was seen to be slipping.
Summerside Mayor Bill Martin called the investment a good move a year ago and said Tuesday he still sees it as such.
The city has been working behind the scenes with the province, said Martin, and despite there being little tangible evidence of that work, the groundwork for future development
was being laid.
Martin said the city has entertained at least four large entities interested in making better use of Slemon Park’s airport, and meetings are ongoing.
The city is hoping, however, to start to see some of those talks between developers and the province come to fruition.
“I’m anxious to see some rubber hit the road here. I’m anxious to see one or more of the kinds of opportunities we’re been exposed
to pursued and become reality,” said Martin.
“I think what they’re looking for is a tenant that will justify the infrastructure investments.”
Those investments will likely be costly.
When the province took over Slemon Park it said one of its main priorities would be the repair of the base’s runways. The last time they had any major resurfacing was in the 1970s.
Kerry Butler, vice-president of finance and administration of MDS Coating Technologies, is also eager to see the runway repaired and other infrastructure work done. His company has been operating out of Slemon Park for several years.
He also thinks the move from mostly private owners to the public sphere was a good one and will, in the long-term, be advantageous to local companies.
“Saying ‘we’re going to invest in creating a larger aerospace hub’ – there’s still a lot of time and effort required to get that accomplished and I don’t believe someone on a for-profit basis probably would sign up for that,” said Butler.
It’s a very competitive time in the aerospace industry, he added, and communities just like Summerside, with old air military airbases available to them, are pushing hard to attract companies.
His business regularly receives unsolicited offers from municipalities all over the world asking them to consider moving and offering aggressive incentives like 20 years of free rent and no taxes, among others, he said.
If P.E.I. wants to continue to be an aerospace hub, he added, it will have to leverage the asset it has in Slemon Park to its full extent.