Nearly 20 per cent of the staff of the the St. Albert Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission building are being moved to a satellite office in Edmonton.
Some 130 staff members will be moved from the current location in Campbell Park in St. Albert to a location on 188th Street and Stony Plain Road in Edmonton. The move is slated to take place over the weekend and early next week.
Communications manager for AGLC Heather Holmen said that the move is due to an increase in staff and that the building, which currently holds 700 employees, has been near capacity for some time. After the move there will be 570 employees remaining at the St. Albert location.
Holmen said that the workers being moved are part of the largest AGLC department, which is regulatory services team, who handle everything from licensing to inspections. The main operations for the AGLC will remain in St. Albert.
The communications manager said that while the move is mostly due to the current AGLC building reaching capacity, the legalization of cannabis and the new staff being hired helped push the building to the staffing limit.
“I wouldn’t say the move is not a result of taking on the new line of business of cannabis. Certainly it was a consideration but even prior to that this building has been close to capacity for quite a while and this took us over capacity,” Holmen said.
Although the AGLC will be taking on more staff to help regulate cannabis, Holmen said that they are currently not sure how many staff members will be hired to take on managing the supply of marijuana. Once the provincial budget is released on March 22 and date of legalization approaches, the provincial organization will have a better idea of the staff increases that will be required.
Holmen said that the AGLC is almost consistently hiring due to succession planning and the natural movement of employees so it is difficult to track how many of those employees were hired due to the legalization of cannabis.
The movement of staff to Edmonton is to accommodate the short term needs due to their current location hitting capacity but it has yet to be determined if the location will be the permanent solution to the increase in staff.
The AGLC has offices in Calgary, Red Deer, Grand Prairie and Lethbridge. The main office is located on Corriveau Avenue in St. Albert. The Edmonton location will be the first satellite location in the Edmonton area.
A massive AGLC liquor warehouse in St. Albert is also slated to open in the summer or fall of this year, which will house the majority of the provincial liquor supply. The new building is 540,000 square feet and has a perimeter of over one kilometre. It is located along Boudreau Road in Campbell Business Park, just north of the Anthony Henday.
The number of staff to be hired to operate the warehouse has not yet been announced. The AGLC is projecting that 18.5 million cases of product will pass through the St. Albert location annually.
