Comeau’s Hill beach committee waiting on approval

The beach in Comeau’s Hill, Yarmouth County, isn’t just a favourite beach for beach go-ers within the Municipality of Argyle. It’s the only beach the municipality has.

But people coming out to sit on the sand or swim in the water are noticing there is no infrastructure – such as porta potties, as an example – on site, whereas there had been in the past.

There’s a reason for this, explains the Municipality of Argyle, but hopefully things will change soon.

In the past, there was a longstanding committee that used to manage the site. That committee disbanded and a new volunteer committee has since taken over.

The original committee had a lease with the Department of Natural Resources for the site. During the transition the new committee has had to reapply for site access, and instead of being a lease it’s now a licence, says the Municipality of Argyle.

The new committee has been in the process of waiting for that licence, which was applied for in October 2017.

The municipality says the committee has been waiting until the licence is approved before adding anything at the site, in case the licence doesn’t go through. Still, a porta-potty may end up the site anyway as it’s easy to set up and remove, the municipality says.

There has been no timeframe given for how long the approval process of the licence will take.

Because the property still belongs to the Department of Natural Resources, the municipality says there isn’t much it can do other than to try and help out the beach committee by acting as a liaison between the committee and the department and to keep applying pressure on the department to have the application dealt with.

The beach is important to the municipality.

“The municipality has always supported the Comeau’s Hill beach through grants to organizations, and we are happy to continue to support the organization when they require it,” says Argyle CAO Alain Muise. “We realize there was a transition of leadership and we hope the community continues to consider this beach an asset to their community.”