At a December 3 council meeting, Ritchot’s economic development officer, Ryan Faucher, reviewed some of the initiatives he’s been working on in the third quarter of 2024.
Electric Vehicles
With at least eight months of data collected so far, Faucher presented some statistics on the two Ford Lightning EV pickup trucks which were purchased by the RM earlier this year to be used by the operations department.
“We have just over 58,000 kilometres on our two trucks year-to-date,” says Faucher. “That’s the equivalent of 134,000 kilograms of C02 eliminated and fuel savings to the RM of just under $15,000.”
At this stage, the public carshare program is making headway, too, Faucher told The Citizen.
Ritchot will soon be adding three EVs to the fleet for public use. At this point, he anticipates purchasing two SUVs and a minivan.
Three more EV chargers are also on order. One will be installed at the civic office in St. Adolphe. The locations for the other two have yet to be decided.
Faucher has been working with the RMs of De Salaberry and Ste. Anne to develop a regional carshare program. Unfortunately, funding from the Rural Transport Solutions Fund (RTSF) was declined on their first application.
“In an ideal world, we would have had up to 18 vehicles across the different communities,” Faucher says.
Not easily deterred, Faucher says he’s going to apply for the funding again from a different angle. This time, the ask will be for a fleet of electric buses to service the area.
“When you ask for funding, the regional approach is really what the government is looking for,” he says. “So if we can work together, we only pay for one software platform across four entities and it just makes the financials work better.”
Continuing on the carshare theme, Faucher is also thinking about university students who live in Ritchot and travel independently to the University of Manitoba or Université de Saint-Boniface on a daily basis. He says that creating partnerships with these universities may be a good way to put at least one of the RM’s carshare vehicles to good use.
“The university would supply a parking spot and we would put a level two electrical charger there,” Faucher says. “Our hope would be to get four or five students from each community [using our car] rather than individuals driving their cars in every day.”
AMBM/CDEM French Information Hub
When the RM expanded the civic office this summer, there was space to spare. It’s now Faucher’s job to fill that space in the most effective way possible.
To do that, he hopes to develop a partnership with the Association of Manitoba Bilingual Municipalities (AMBM) and Conseil de Développement Èconomique Montagnaise (CDEM). These two organizations, which exist to serve bilingual municipalities, would apply for funding to hire a resource person and materials to occupy a local office.
The mandate would be to provide advice and assistance to potential and existing municipal business owners.
“They may do workshops or training to help people get established in the municipality,” says Faucher. “The advantage to us is that we’ll have more programming and resources to offer to the community.”
