It was polite, but it was still rejection.
Estevan's city council had made a formal bid for some mitigation money from SaskPower to compensate the community for the stress and strain on local infrastructure as the province's main Crown corporation heads into the backstretch on its impressive carbon capture and sequestration project at Boundary Dam.
The plea did not fall on deaf ears, but in his response to council, Robert Watson, SaskPower's president and CEO, pretty well said something to the effect of "thanks for asking, but no dice."
Now, we can't fault the City of Estevan for trying to garner a little extra cash and the claim is certainly legitimate. It wasn't as if they were trying to milk a cash cow here.
It's a well known fact that SaskPower will be calling on most of its cash reserves and future income to pay for this $1.2 billion project and the prospects of receiving additional financial assistance from the government of Canada beyond the original $240 million injection is remote, even though the project will have national and international implications.
SaskPower did provide some support for local infrastructure when the Shand Power Station was being built, but those were different times. Elections were being fought and votes needed to be purchased, plus SaskPower was on a more gentle spending slope at the time with only one major project on the books.
Take a look at today's power generating needs. Natural gas plants that had to be installed quickly to meet increasing demands are still being amortized. A new plant that is supposedly going to be built in Premier Brad Wall's constituency near Swift Current or maybe near Lanigan in central Saskatchewan, is now on board. It too, will require funding as it advances past planning stages into an action plan.
So it's understandable why Watson and his team are saying no at this juncture, even in the face of precedent.
We don't know how hard our council and, by extension, the RM of Estevan council, should push this topic, but it does create an interesting debate.
There is hard evidence that our city's facilities, infrastructure and support systems are being maxed out and abused and much of that is due to the strains of providing for hundreds of people who are deployed on the SaskPower project. But in return, the Crown corporation can respond by suggesting that other industries (oil, trucking, agriculture, et al) are the major causes of our dilemma, not them.
If Estevan's administration can respond with hard facts related directly to the CO2 project, then we would advise them to keep fighting the good fight. If not, then they should retreat to the neutral corner with the understanding that SaskPower remains a good corporate citizen even if it doesn't have the cash to flash like it once did. It is still providing a strong base that Estevan can draw from in terms of value added property taxes and business cash flows. They're providing the means ... we'll have to find the way.
In the meantime, the City could be seeking out other avenues of financial support since the Boundary Dam project is providing plenty of opportunities to cash in on the action.
