Coun. Sheena Hughes wants the site of a future high school in growing north St. Albert shovel-ready sooner rather than later.
At a Nov. 12 committee meeting, Hughes gave notice that she will bring a motion to their regular council meeting Nov. 19 calling for city staff to create a plan to bring water and sewer service to the Erin Ridge North site that could be put to work by the second quarter of 2025.
She wants the plan to be costed and returned to council for debate by Feb. 7. This means the project would be done separately from and ahead of what is envisioned in the northeast area structure plan (ASP), which passed first reading Nov. 5. With the planning and construction work that would be required, that could be three years away.
It’s actually a two-part ask: To even debate the question, her colleagues will have to first agree to waive a 20-day waiting period that by rule must elapse between a notice of motion’s introduction and its appearance on a council agenda.
“I understand those are tight timelines,” she said.
Hughes told the Gazette Wednesday city staff have come up with documents on a short deadline when directed by council in the past. She said she intends to argue that St. Albert can't wait two or three years to ready the high school site: It must be ready for the coming intake of the new $8.6 billion School Construction Accelerator Program on offer from the province.
The program aims to build as many as 90 new schools, 30 per year in 2025, '26 and '27, and retrofit or replace 24 others in fast-growing parts of Alberta but to be considered, sites have to be shovel-ready, which includes water and sewer service.
"If administration is able to make that happen and make it a possibility, I think we owe it to the residents and the people that are desperately looking for the high school to make that an option," she said. "I don't know what the province will do, but I do not want to handicap our ability to get a school built there."
Hughes hopes St. Albert can at least get to where there is a plan to render the site shovel-ready when the time comes to apply for the provincial cash, likely in the spring, which is when the next provincial fiscal update (budget) will be tabled.
"It puts us on the potential list and I would like to be on the potential list (versus) not on any list at all when there's this many schools that are coming out," she explained. "I don't know what the level of investment will be in future years, but we do know what the amount of investment coming out at this time is."
That school accelerator came up in conversation Nov. 5, when St. Albert Public Schools trustee Kristi Rouse was in council chambers armed with statistics that showed their schools, those in the west and north in particular, are growing half again as fast as the city's population.
Rouse said Nov. 5 the public board serves 9,800 students and is growing at three per cent a year, but enrolment has increased about 50 per cent faster than the city’s population since 2018, and is up 41 per cent since 2012.
She added that much of the city’s growth has taken place north of Villeneuve Road, and the state of the public schools there reflects the trend: Lois E. Hole Elementary School (opened 2017) is at 113 per cent utilization and Joseph M. Denko Secondary (2019), the board’s fastest-growing, is at 76 per cent.
Rouse pointed out that a school receives the maximum provincial operating and maintenance funding at 85 per cent capacity, implying that enrolment above that number puts pressure on the board.
"A school feels pretty darn full at 85 per cent."
Rouse urged the councillors to take advantage of provincial accelerator fund.
“We need schools … both in the west and in the north,” she said. “When you look at the city’s map of where existing school sites are as well as the ones that are available, whether they are shovel ready or not, we need all of them.
“If this doesn’t go ahead, we’ll have to pivot … (but Erin Ridge) is still the best solution.”
