Charlottetown Yacht Club urges province, city to kick in cash for seawall repairs

The seawall around the Charlottetown Yacht Club is around 75 years old, and it's starting to show its age. 

Years of fierce windstorms, pounding waves and piles of ice have deteriorated the structure on the city's waterfront to the point where it now needs urgent repairs. 

Stephen Cudmore, a past commodore of the club, said major storms like Dorian and Fiona took their toll on the already aging seawall.

"After 75 years, it's very understandably getting tired and very worn out. In fact, it was worn out many years ago," he said. "Rising sea levels [are] a thing, and if you were to combine those storm surges with the wind and wave events added to the state of the infrastructure that exists there … you could have a catastrophic failure quite easily."

Harbourside Engineering and Consulting, the firm contracted by the club to assess the seawall, estimated the cost to replace it to be $5.5 million. 

The club has already secured almost $3.7 million of that from ACOA, but that funding is tied to post-Fiona relief programs and has to be designated to the project within 60 days. And before the club can get that money, the P.E.I. government and the City of Charlottetown have to kick in some cash too. 

The ask

Here's a breakdown of the ask from the yacht club: 

• $318,000 from the city 
• $744,000 from the province 
• $368,000 from the Charlottetown Area Development Corporation, which owns part of the property next to the club 
• The club itself plans to contribute $400,000

Cudmore understands it might be a tough request on a tight deadline, but said the money for the upgrades can be spread out over a number of years once it's secured. 

"The funding that we've got in place right now will just get us back to the state we were in before. If we want this project to last us the next 100 years, we need to raise that bar and raise the land," he said. "That's what the ask is to the other funding authorities to be able to put us in a position not just to get a new seawall … [but] we'd rather fix it once and fix it right." 

The provincial government told CBC News it's reviewing the yacht club's ask as part of its 2024-25 budget process. P.E.I.'s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure also said it's aware of ACOA's funding deadline and is actively reviewing the request.

Cudmore said the club will start ordering materials immediately once it has the proper funding, and work on the seawall would begin this fall. 

While some residents might take issue with a private entity asking for taxpayer money for the project, Cudmore said the Charlottetown Yacht Club has morphed into a multipurpose community facility over the years. 

That portion of the waterfront includes independent tourism businesses like restaurants, seal-watching tours and sailing programs.

"We're just the stewards of this land. We're just trying to look after it as best we can," he said. "It's shocking, the need when you look at the devastation these storms bring. It's not an if, it's a when this infrastructure fails the land of the Charlottetown waterfront is going to slide into the harbour."