Last week, St. Albert city council heard some of the 16 new full-time staff positions proposed in next year's draft budget are needed to handle an increased workload, specifically in business licensing and development inspections.
The city's proposed budget for 2024, released late last month, comes with a 5.5 per cent property tax increase and 7.2 per cent increase in monthly utility fees.
On Nov. 1, city chief administrative officer Bill Fletcher, along with deputy chief administrative officer Kerry Hilts, gave council presentations on the proposed 2024 budgets for the city's planning and engineering and public operations departments, both of which are asking for council to approve a number of new staff positions.
In response to a question from Coun. Sheena Hughes about the proposed hiring of a new building compliance officer, which will add $56,200 to next year's operating costs, Adryan Slaght, the city's director of planning and engineering told council the two existing building compliance officers are “maxed out.”
“With the volume that we have in place, and with the inspections that are being conducted, everybody is kind of maxed out on time — those inspectors are maxed out on time,” Slaght said, adding that in each of the last two years, the city has received nearly 6,000 building and mechanical permit applications.
Prior to 2022, Slaght said, the previous record for most permit applications received by the city was about 4,700.
“We've seen a substantial increase in permits, and we're seeing a really significant growth right now, particularly on the electrical side of things,” he said. “If you ask an inspector when the last time [was] they sat down for an hour lunch, I don't know when that would be.”
Hughes also asked about a proposed new development officer position, which would add $91,000 to the city's 2024 operating costs, and Slaght said it would be the city's first additional position in that branch since 2012.
Slaght also said that, like the building compliance staff, the city's development officers are dealing with a substantially higher workload and an increasingly complex one.
Municipal development officers are responsible for ensuring submitted building and development plans meet local regulations, such as parking and setback requirements.
“We're just seeing more and more and more pushback on some of the regulations,” Slaght told council. “What we're seeing is we're getting greater variance, we're getting more of these permits that are chewing up significant amounts of time, and we don't have the resources to be able to handle the volume that seems to be coming in.”
A variance in this context means a submitted development or building plan that doesn't meet exact city regulations. Development officers are authorized to approve some variances, depending on how great it is.
“We have seen a lot of developers, or builders, that are coming in with plans and [documents] that are based on other communities, and they don't want to come in and meet St. Albert standards for development,” Slaght said.
“A part of it is, I think, some developers and builders are frankly happy to rely on public staff to, in part, design some of their projects because they're not putting in the work with their consultants to do the job that they should have done with our standards in place.”
Following the Nov. 1 meeting, Hughes submitted information requests asking administration whether the city's forecasted 2024 revenue accounts for the increased number of building and development permits that staff are receiving.
