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Northern
www.northernsentinel.com
Volume 56 No. 20
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
1.34 INCLUDES TAX
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A great Relay for Life It was a Relay to remember at the track field at Mount Elizabeth Secondary School on May 5. The community gathered for its annual major fundraiser for cancer research which also featured local food and live music. Read and see more about it on page 11.
Kitimat cottage resort planned Cameron Orr The Mills family is seeking to capitalize on the influx of executive level employees to Kitimat with a plan to develop a hamlet of cottages on their property where their Minette Bay Lodge is now. Speaking for the project, Dr. Howard Mills, speaking on behalf wife Ruth Mills who could not attend the meeting, pitched the idea to Kitimat Council with the hope they would approve a zoning amendment for their property, at 2255 Kitamaat Village Road. “We’ve heard that it’s difficult for companies to recruit and retain the management and executives that they wish to move here simply because they operate all over the world and the family might decide that a project in Bahrain where the sun shines all the time rather than Kitimat where it never does might be preferable,” he said. The zoning amendment being asked for would alter their G5A zoning to G4-A Rural Resort Zone over the entirety of the Mills’ 20.5 hectare property, comprised of two lots, to allow for the development of the cottages.
Mills said the plan is to establish 14 to 16 of the housing units, which are being purchased in the United Kingdom, to take advantage of current currency benefits. Howard Mills called the project, referred to as Pyne Hamlet, a dream of his and Ruth’s and that their existing lodge wasn’t large enough to fill the housing need for management and executives of industry in Kitimat. A second phase of the project would see the building of a “proper English pub,” which Dr. Mills said that, when built, would be the most genuine English pub in the province. “In due course, the whole collective, the lodge, the dining pub and the hamlet, could become some sort of resort to promote the town in all four seasons,” he added. Residents of the hamlet would have access to the extensive acreage that the Mills own. The housing units themselves are planned to be shipped over the winter and the Mills hope to have engineering done as soon as possible. At the earliest, Mills said he envisions
An artist’s rendering of the proposed Pyne Hamlet project, to be built near the existing Minette Bay Lodge. first occupancy in mid-2013. Council voted in favour of administration’s recommendation to receive the appli-
cation and send it to a future Committee of the Whole meeting, as well to the Advisory Planning Commission.
More Relay photos, see page 11