On Tuesday city council's committee of the whole will be discussing the future of the city's photo radar, or Automated Traffic Enforcement (ATE) program, as well as a new heritage recognition policy.
A lengthy report to council about the city's ATE program explains that administration is asking council for direction before the city's contract for ATE services with Global Traffic Group expires next May, and given the increased administrative workload to run the program as a result of regulatory changes brought in by the provincial government in 2021, council may want to maintain, scale-up, or scale-down ATE efforts.
The increased workload, according to a separate report by Aaron Giesbrecht, the city's manager of emergency services, stems from the provincial government creating additional requirements for ATE in terms of enforcement location justification, program documentation, public communication, and reporting.
If council directs administration to maintain the current ATE program as it currently operates, which administration is recommending, Giesbrecht wrote that the city will likely need to hire an additional full-time staff member at a cost of about $100,000 per year in order to make sure the city remains compliant with provincial regulations.
Despite the administrative workload increasing as a result of new provincial regulations, the ATE program report actually states that over the last two years the city amended its contract with Global Traffic Group to reduce the number of enforcement hours by about 43 per cent.
Currently, through the use of three red light cameras and three mobile photo radar units, the city contracts about 6,850 hours of ATE a year, which equals out to 18 hours per day.
“Despite the lack of certainty on where the program may be headed in Alberta, it has been made clear through the [2021 provincial changes] that the standard needed to justify photo enforcement sites has significantly increased,” the program report reads.
“We have already seen challenges in addressing the increased workload in the areas of data analysis and reporting without an increase in resources.”
Other options Giesbrecht put forward include scaling-down the city's ATE program, specifically by only the red lights cameras and having photo radar in school zones, construction zones, and playground zones only, all of which require no other justification under the province's regulations.
This option would “significantly” reduce staff resources for reporting and analysis, the program report states, although it means the city would remove approximately 50 per cent of all photo radar sites from future enforcement efforts and miss out on about $800,000 to $1 million in annual revenue.
The Gazette will have more coverage of the committee's discussion in the coming days, and in the Thursday, Nov. 16 edition of the newspaper.
Heritage recognition policy
In response to a motion council passed at the beginning of the year, city administration has drafted a new “Heritage Recognition” policy to replace the existing Founders' Day policy and proclamation.
The Founders' Day policy and proclamation was created in 2012 and enacted in 2013, and since then every January the Mayor of St. Albert reads the proclamation at the beginning of a council meeting to “celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the community of St. Albert.”
This past January, the Arts and Heritage Foundation (AHF), who are on the receiving end of the proclamation each year, asked Mayor Heron not to read it, as the Foundation felt the policy needed to be modernized.
“They highlighted that the existing policy mainly centred on the establishment of the Mission settlement in 1861 and the missionary's legacy,” a report to council written by the city's director of community services, Elizabeth Wilkie, states.
“Furthermore, they identified that the proclamation had a limited scope, giving prominence to only a portion of the contributions to St. Albert's history while overlooking others.”
Mayor Cathy Heron still read the proclamation this past January, although she added a preamble to address the AHF's concerns, and council subsequently passed a motion to have administration review the policy.
With the review complete, administration is asking council to rescind the Founders' Day policy and replace it with a new Heritage Recognition policy.
A draft of the new policy doesn't include a proclamation of any sort, and simply states that it's council's responsibility to “recognize St. Albert's rich cultural history by other means each year, in its discretion.”
The Gazette will have further coverage of the proposed new policy, as well as the committee of the whole's discussion on Tuesday in the Thursday, Nov. 16 edition of the newspaper and online.
