Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’ve worked closely with the communities, and communities have provided us with their five-year capital plan, because they realize how much they’re getting over the next number of years so they do a good job in prioritizing their investments over the next five years. I was looking at them, actually earlier this morning, and they’ve done a great job in some of their priorities and even recognizing the fact that with development coming and that, you know, we’ve got to be ready for it. Again, it’s a decision that the community government makes.

We have assistant...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member raised a lot of interesting points. Again, we appreciate the support of the Member. The $835,000 he spoke of was an internal allocation to try and address some of the housing issues for professionals in the community. However, we’re looking forward to bringing forward initiatives to this Assembly, with the support of this Assembly, and we’re looking forward to bringing some initiatives forward that would help try and address some of the issues in a lot of the small communities that have challenges with housing for staff. So we’re looking at updating committee...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to respond. We appreciate the Member’s comments and he’s absolutely right; the communities have taken this responsibility. There have been some challenges, but for the most part they’ve done a fantastic job at determining their projects and their priorities, and you’re absolutely right when you say gone are the days when you tried to get your project into the capital system. So it’s been working and we’re quite pleased with how the communities have responded to the challenges of administering this themselves. They’ve done a great job. In...

I’m sorry. I apologize. I was so concentrating on the first point the Member made, I forgot about the second.

We are monitoring the one unit that we have up in Inuvik. We are able to monitor the use there as far as utilities go. I am committing to providing data to all the Members on some of the savings that we are seeing because of using a few more energy-efficient systems plus the work that we have done on the units themselves.

Right now it is fairly early in the game. We do have a new system where we are able to monitor the utility costs for pretty well every unit in the NWT Housing...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is correct; the infrastructure budget itself hasn’t changed from the $28 million in 2000, but what we’ve done is we’ve heard from the communities and they are challenged, they are getting more and more buildings and they’re challenged with the O and M side of it. But we have made it a little more flexible with the capital budget where they’re able to use 10 percent towards their O and M.

As far as increasing the infrastructure budget, their biggest concern right now was the O and M side of it. We’re working with Canada to try to find out what our share of the...

Madam Chair, as far as biomass goes for this coming fiscal year, we don’t have it identified anywhere but we do have… It’s in the notes that we provided. There are some solar panel initiatives that are being undertaken this year that identifies a location. That could take place during 2014-15. Thank you.

Yes I would. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We look forward to getting the project underway in Aklavik for the seniors. We also have, as the Member knows, earmarked seniors for Fort McPherson.

As far as the public housing portfolio goes, I mean, we’re always looking at our communities with the most need, and when we do our allocation of public housing replacement units we tend to target those that are in most need. Right now, the two communities, I mean, there is a need in every community and we have to weigh that against the other communities, and that will help us determine where some of our replacement units go...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is correct; these 159, we call them modernization and improvement projects, they are to upgrade our energy in a lot of these units because a lot of them are older units, so there’s a lot of good work done on them there.

As far as the number, we will have to pull that information together for committee and then I will make a commitment here that we will provide them with that information as to the number of units that we’ve had over the last few years that we’ve gone through the NMI process. So we’ll provide that to the Members. Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have no opening remarks, Madam Chair, but I will bring in witnesses.