By Kellah Lavoie

Melfort is growing economically: Mayor

Nov 21, 2010 | 7:39 AM

Melfort is one of the provinces quickest growing communities.
According to the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency, the city is worth $63.44 million more than four years ago, it’s an increase of 27 per cent.
Mayor Kevin Phillips said, he is not surprised by the increase in value of properties.
“There was an awful lot of building happening in that period, an awful lot of housing being built as well as commercial,” he said.
What Phillips was surprised by, was how much higher Melfort’s numbers were than other similar sized cities in the area. Its increase is 40 per cent higher than the next best performing community.
It’s a trend Phillips doesn’t think will go away anytime soon.
“This year just in private building, commercial building will be our largest year ever,” he said explaining the new Stonegate Shopping Centre has contributed greatly.
“The residential took off, and you have to have community growth before developers will look at it. So we had residential growth for a couple of years and now the commercial took off, and now that the commercial has took off it will feed residential that will feed more commercial, so we are underway now,” he said.
Melfort is also on top when it comes to population.
Phillips said the last numbers they got from the health region are 5,874, but he said the number is likely to be closer to 6,000.
According to SAMA it is an increase of three per cent since 2007, neighbouring communities with a population between 5,000 and 10,000 were at 2.34 per cent and 1.41 per cent.
“I would prefer to think that now we are on track. Now we are going to continue growing into the future and we’re going to be affected by maybe Shore Gold… lots of pressures to grow and what a change,” he said.
Phillips also made it clear that the growing population is not all a good thing.
With the increase in stores and a new hotel being built, the city might not have the housing capabilities.
“What we’re missing right now is some rentals… I’m not convinced we can make big gains on it without help from the province and especially help from the federal government,” he said.
Phillips was at a building capacities conference in Saskatoon last week, and he said housing is a problem everywhere in the province. While he said, the conference offered solutions, they need governmental help to keep up with the boom.
“We have a rental deficit, we’re under one per cent rental vacancies, we just don’t have enough of them,” Phillips said.
klavoie@panow.com