THUNDER BAY – The proposed Marten Falls community access road is approaching a milestone as public input into a draft environmental assessment and impact statement will close on June 23.
Afterward, the information that is collected from the public will be compiled into a final version.
Officials with the Marten Falls Access Road project were in Thunder Bay last month to provide community members with an update on the environmental assessment process.
“We start to get to do an environmental assessment in the later stages. Doing the readings, some draft reports now, trying to finalize the draft reports, and hopefully we'll get them to the regulators probably next year,” Lawrence Baxter, community lead for Marten Falls First Nation, told Newswatch.
Baxter said once the regulatory approvals are in place, crews will be able to break ground on the access road.
“We're reviewing draft reports right now as a project team. We have a project team that reviews those draft reports, you know, if there's any change that has to be done, we make some changes, and once we're done, then we'll go back to our community members and the public again for the review,” Baxter said.
He said the project team is trying to gather as much input from the community to inform the project's environmental assessment.
Baxter said the community has expressed some concern about the environmental impact the road might have once it’s built, but throughout their community engagement sessions, he is hearing “less and less.”
“Which is a good sign, and that's not to say we're going to stop looking at some of these issues. I mean, we're always in the back of our minds that there's gonna be some environmental impacts, and we try to lessen those impacts, and that's our priority,” Baxter said.
He said the impact is not only on the land itself, but First Nations in the area have identified some secret sites which the project is trying to avoid.
Other concerns, he said, were about the fisheries and the fear of increased traffic in the area.
“We're trying to address some of those issues right now, definitely finalize it, but I think, once we get the regulation, I mean, the approvals in place, then we'll start talking about how we're gonna manage some of these concerns,” Baxter said.
The Marten Falls Access Road is approximately 190 to 230 kilometres in length, connecting the northern end of the Painter Lake forestry road to the community of Marten Falls.
Marten Falls is located at the junction of the Albany and Ogoki rivers, approximately 170 kilometres northeast of Nakina, Ontario.
Once completed, the Marten Falls Community Access Road Project has the potential to enable further access to the Ring of Fire.