Which facilities need to be built in St. Albert and when? And how is the need determined before those decisions come to the council table?
Those are the questions administration and council are still in the process of working out as they contemplate changes to the New Facility Predictive Model.
Build St. Albert director Monique St. Louis presented a discussion paper about changes to the model at council’s Nov. 14 Standing Committee of the Whole, following a council motion in May to revise the model to incorporate more data along with weighting factors.
“The feedback and discussion from council is going to be critical for the next stages,” she said.
The data-driven tool, which has been in the works since the start of 2015, is meant to take the politics out of the capital decision-making process by forecasting the need for new municipal facilities based on specific data inputs.
The proposed changes to the model would keep the objective long-term predictive nature of the model, based on factors like benchmarks from similar cities, facility usage and population forecasts. It will add a scoring process and allow a more subjective council discussion to prioritize projects as they come into the three-year funding cycle.
St. Louis explained the second, more subjective, stage of the process would weight prospective facilities based on criteria including demographic change community demand for the project.
Mayor Nolan Crouse said one of his big concerns is that while the model accounts for population growth, it doesn’t necessarily break that down further. He noted St. Albert is seeing growth in older age groups, but is relatively stagnant in terms of the youth population.
“While we might need an arena every 15,000 people, we really need an arena for every 4,000 youth, and we’re not growing the number of youth,” he said.
Likewise, he said, something that will drive facility use is what it costs. Offering free hockey, for instance, would drive up usage and demand for arenas. The same holds true for art classes or the walking track at Servus Place.
“Some of it is driven by what we charge people,” he said. “I don’t think the model takes into account where you follow the money.”
Coun. Tim Osborne argued city subsidies of programs shouldn’t necessarily be understood to mean the demand for a facility is artificially inflated.
“The idea that if it’s subsidized it should have a lower score is counter-intuitive,” he said. “We subsidize things that cost money, but we subsidize because people want it.”
Coun. Wes Brodhead said it would be crucial to consider the city’s financial constraints as well, incorporating the affordability factor into decisions.
“The model itself build an imperative for action,” he said. “All of the sudden there’s five or six facilities and we’re behind the eight ball, and that puts pressure on council.”
He also noted there are policies in place that restrict usage. For example, while there’s more demand for swimming in the city, council’s spontaneous-use policy prevents expansion of swimming in some cases.
Coun. Sheena Hughes likewise noted the challenges associated with policies that might tend to tie the city’s hands, arguing for example that while the library is at capacity for many programs, some of that could be alleviated by using space more creatively – for example, offering some library programs outside of the library itself.
“We’re allowing policies to create the need prematurely,” she said.
The matter is expected to come back to council Feb. 21, 2017, at which time administration will present an implementation plan for an updated model.
