A public meetings will be held in Winnipeg on January 12 from 7 - 9 p.m at Fort Garry United Church, located at 800 Point Road. Another public meeting will be booked for the Victoria Beach area.

The RM approval allows an engineer to begin preliminary planning for the wall. Then the proposal will be submitted to Manitoba's Shoreline Erosion Technical Committee for review and recommendations. The proponents want to start work in January and be finished by April.

Lake Winnipeg's shorelines suffered severe erosion following an October 27, 2010 weather bomb that caused winds of more than 90 kilometres per hour over Lake Winnipeg. With already high moisture levels and flooding expected in Spring 2011 some lakefront cottage owners are concerned about potential erosion of their properties and are pushing for the wall. Other residents are concerned about impacts the wall will have on the heavily used public beaches, and that the proposal is being hastily approved without adequately consulting the public.

"I believe we need a plan [for shoreline erosion], but I don't believe this [the wall proposal] is it. If we allow this to go on, we may lose the beach," said RM of Victoria Beach councillor Kathy McKibbin who voted against the proposal.

"People don't want to come to the beach in the summer and be gobsmacked with the construction," said RM Councillor Karen Boyd, who also then voted for the proposal on December 20th.

Reeve Tom Farrell, who voted in favour of the proposal on December 20th, indicated that the RM cannot always be asking for public input, which in this case could delay construction for a year. "Some of these decisions are not always pleasant," Farrell said.