Nearly a year later after hosting forest fire and flood evacuees from the James Bay Coast, the Town of Kapuskasing is still on the hook for much of those expenses.
The town originally submitted a claim for $7.1 million but recently added more to bring the total to $7.6 million.
Administrator Guylain Baril confirmed that as of this month $650,000 was still left to be reimbursed.
“It used to be a much quicker process with a month or two of submitting a claim we would get the payments for that,” he said. “There was never a concern to be made whole for the expenses incurred for hosting evacuations but this has been a real exception. It actually started in 2022 so those bills took a while to be paid as well.”
Baril says at some point the town will have to write off other costs associated including staff wages, fees and benefits.
“The biggest one is the staff wages so the town had approved the fees for deploying staff to take care of evacuations,” he said. “In the past it was just recovering the sheer cost of the staff, but what we found over the years that it was more than just the actual salary of that person there’s benefits.”
