by Sophie Kuijper Dickson
Shawville
May. 13, 2024
Illumination of the Main Street sidewalk in Shawville is no longer at the whims of often faulty Hydro Québec street lights.
In April, the municipality installed 12 solar-powered street lamps along the street’s northern sidewalk – seven west of Centre Street, and five east of it.
The new lights are thanks to a collaboration between the municipality and Jill McBane, owner of Main Street’s Boutique Shawville Shooz, who many years ago took it upon herself to raise money for their purchase.
“As a store owner here I have no outside lights. In the winter time when you close up at 4 or 5 p.m. It’s pretty dark out there,” McBane said.
“When you’re in other towns and you see all of these nice attractive lights plus they’re serving a purpose, I’m like, ‘Why can’t Shawville have these?’”
McBane joined forces with the local business group Shop Shawville to organize street markets over the years that doubled as fundraising events for the lights.
When Richard Armitage was elected to Shawville council, McBane did not waste any time getting him on board with her project.
“When I got elected in Nov. 2021, the very next day Jill contacted me and told me that she had a project underway to get sidewalk lamp posts on this side of Main Street,” Councillor Armitage recalled, sitting in an armchair in McBane’s shoe store last week.
“She contacted me about once every two weeks for two years, and we finally got it done,” he laughed.
In total, the solar lamps cost $53,024.93. Shop Shawville raised $3,285 for the project, $40,423 was covered by a Volet 2 grant from MRC Pontiac, and the remaining $9,316.14 was paid for by Shawville.
“Without the help of Richard and Shawville council we’d be still raising money for these lamps,” McBane said.
“If they hadn’t gotten the grant, I was going to start an auction or do something to jump up the process because at $15 a table it would take me forever to raise the money.”
Installation of the lights began at the end of March.
The municipality decided to set the lamps along the business side of the sidewalk and away from the sidewalk’s edge to prevent the posts from being hit by car doors and bumpers, and make snow clearing easier.
Armitage said the municipality learned the perils of installing objects along the street edge of Main Street’s sidewalks when it put in some trees, before he was elected councillor.
This spring, only two trees were left standing, and one of them was dead, so the municipality decided to remove them and plant new trees at Mill Dam Park where they would be protected from the offenses of parking cars and snow removal machinery.
“Most of them got killed by getting hit with bumpers and stuff, and street salt. It’s just not a friendly environment for trees,” Armitage said, noting the hope is that placing the new lamps right along the storefronts will increase their lifespan and make it easier for people to park on Main Street.
HQ street lamps unreliable
It’s not that Shawville’s Main Street has been without street lights all of these years.
The municipality pays $78,000 a year to rent and electrify 220 street lights from Hydro Québec. About 20 of these are along Main Street.
In exchange, Hydro Québec is supposed to maintain the lights.
But Armitage said that many of the lights are currently out of order, and that often when repairs are made, they only last a few days.
“The sidewalk is dark, and we have a lot of issues with hydro street lights not working,” he said.
It’s for this reason that in the winter of 2022, the municipality decided to purchase the streetlights from Hydro Québec and signed an agreement with the corporation to that effect.
The purchase agreement stated that the hydro company had 12 months to repair all street lights, at which point Shawville would buy them for $55,000, about the cost of a year’s rental.
Once Shawville owns the lights, the operating cost would drop to about $25,000 a year.
Armitage said the sale was to be complete by Feb. 2023, but that the municipality still has not been able to purchase the lights.
“Hydro still hasn’t gotten about 50-some lights working. They come and they fix them and they’re out in two days. It’s just an ongoing battle with Hydro,” Armitage said.
“So thank goodness these [solar] lights work.”
