Note: this story was updated at 10:30pm on April 11, 2023.
Shep the Sandpiper is back in Dorchester and will stay there for the time being, despite controversy about how it got there.
At their council meeting Tuesday night, council voted unanimously to keep the statue where it is, even though the town does not yet own the statue, and the process to acquire it was not quite by the book. The unanimous motion also included a request for town engineer Jon Eppell to examine the installation and ensure it is safe.
Mayor Andrew Black voted in favour of the motion along with the rest of council, but had some stern words before the vote, regarding the renegade manner that Shep was replaced. Black said the statue, “puts the town of Tantramar at an insurance and liability risk,” and also, “throws our RFP [request for proposals] and RFQ [request for quotations] processes out the window, leaving the town open to the potential of risk going forward.”
No other councillors commented on the motion during last night’s meeting, and Dorchester councillor Debbie Wiggins-Colwell also refused to comment afterwards. CAO Jennifer Borne was similarly quiet on the issue, referring only to the motion passed by council.
The long road to replace Shep
Former village councillor Kara Becker, who appeared before Tantramar council in March to request support for the return of the sculpture, says the new bird was installed on Saturday by a team of volunteers. No town of Tantramar staff were involved with the installation.
Becker says a single donor contributed the full artist’s fee of $9300 directly to the creator of the new Shep, Robin Hanson. And then a group of volunteers drove up to Hanson’s studio outside Oromocto to pick up the bird on Easter weekend.
Hanson built Shep after he was approached by former village mayor Debbie Wiggins-Colwell, who had commissioned the project on behalf of a group of local volunteers and not the village of Dorchester, according to Hanson.
‘How does that work?’
That’s where things get confusing for Dorchester resident Bill Steele, who lives across from the new Shep in the Dorchester Jail. Steele has written to Tantramar staff and council asking for an explanation of how the new Shep came about without any involvement from the former village or the town of Tantramar. Steele says he feels left out of the process, and is concerned as a former Toronto civil servant, that proper procurement procedures were not followed.
Steele says he himself has been on the disappointing end of the municipal rule book, after he was asked to get rid of goats that he kept on his property in 2018, and now as he continues to try to get the Mel’s Tea Room sign mounted on the outside of the Dorchester Jail. After having so much trouble himself, he wondered how a group of volunteers was able to get Shep installed this past weekend. “How come these guys just drove up in a pickup truck and threw that up there?” asked Steele in an interview Monday. “How does that work?”
A tale of two Sheps
Back in 2020, the village of Dorchester council approved up to $15,000 to build a new viewing platform for Shep, and another $2,500 for the repair of the previous wooden bird by original artist Monty MacMillan. The platform was eventually built in 2021, but the repairs to the statue fell through when MacMillan first found wood rot in the statue, and then had all his tools stolen in the fall of 2021. The last official mention of Shep in Village council minutes is several months later in May 2022, when MacMillan’s bad news is shared, and council is told the replacement project will be left to 2023.
In the meantime, some Dorchester residents were not happy with waiting yet another year to replace their beloved statue, which was taken down sometime in 2020 for repair.
MacMillan referred village mayor Debbie Wiggins-Colwell to another New Brunswick artist who could do the job, and so Wiggins-Colwell approached Hanson. The artist is adamant that his commission did not come from the village, but from the community group led by Wiggins-Colwell, who brought him the legs and beak from the original statue. (That’s a sticking point for Steele, who points out the appendages were property of the village.)
While Wiggins-Colwell was negotiating a $9300 price tag with Hanson for a fibreglass and epoxy version of Shep, the village council also sent off their capital budget wish list to provincial consultant Chad Peters, requesting “60,000+” for an item listed as “Shep Tourist Attraction,” with a note reading “grant, options.” Former village CAO and current Tantramar CAO Jennifer Borne won’t share further information about the process to replace Shep, or why the requested amount was $60,000+. It’s possible that the town was considering a bronzing process for the statue, which according to Hanson could have cost over $100,000.
Eventually, Peters and the province chose not to include Shep in Tantramar’s capital budget. Around the same time, Robin Hanson finished his reincarnated Shep. That’s what brought Kara Becker to council in March, asking for financial support to cover the $9300 artist fee, and get the new Shep installed as soon as possible. But Becker says there was no support forthcoming from Tantramar council after her March presentation, and she was also told by CAO Jennifer Borne that the municipality was not yet in a position to accept donations for the project.
So Becker and friends came up with a workaround. An anonymous donor contributed the full cost directly to Hanson, meaning the town did not have to be involved in the transaction.
For now it appears that Tantramar staff and council will accept the gift of a free Shep replacement, though the bird does not yet formally belong to the town.
For Steele’s part, he says he didn’t want to see the bird removed, but he still wants to know the full story of how the sculpture was commissioned, and suspects that Tantramar’s code of conduct was violated in the process. He says he has filed a formal complaint with the town and will continue to push for answers.
