The Capital Region Board has a new plan to preserve farmland, and it could lead to a taller, denser St. Albert.
The board’s growth plan update task force reviewed the first draft of the board’s new growth plan last week. If approved, the plan would bring in new policies to preserve agricultural lands in the greater Edmonton region and set new density targets for existing and undeveloped regions.
The capital region expects to add about a million people to its ranks in the next 30 years, noted board chair and St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse. Many of them will want to live in cities.
“Those new (urbanites) are going to live on what is farmland today.”
St. Albert and Sturgeon County are both built on prime agricultural land for the most part, said county Mayor Tom Flynn.
“In the long run, we’re going to run out of land that provides us with the food we need to eat.”
Our ag-lands, meanwhile, could make this region a major food producer in Canada and draw value-added businesses like a bran-flake factory, he continued. But that will only happen if communities start growing up rather than out.
The draft plan, if approved, would cause the capital region to take up about 39 per cent less land (about 300 quarter-sections) by 2044 than the current one, a report to the board suggests.
It would do this by setting mandatory density targets for greenfield developments, voluntary intensification targets for built-up spots, and voluntary targets for downtown and transit-orientated areas.
For example, new developments in the currently empty fields in St. Albert’s north and west ends would have to have at least 50 residences per net residential hectare, and would generally have more row homes and apartments and fewer single-detached ones.
The built-up part of St. Albert, meanwhile, would aim to get about 17.5 per cent denser than it is now by 2044, ultimately hosting some 14,500 people along St. Albert Trail and around Grandin mall.
The new towers at Grandin will help St. Albert meet this target, Crouse said. The local food movement and market demand are also already driving denser development. The bigger challenge will be the greenfield targets, as those zones won’t be planned for another 15 years.
Leduc Mayor Greg Krischke criticized the draft, saying that rural governments can’t expect urban ones to build up when they see Leduc County and Parkland County approving new developments on prime agricultural lands.
“These are just some examples, and they leave the strong impression that No. 1 farmland preservation is only to stop urban municipalities from expanding their borders into county lands,” he told the board.
If the board was serious about this, it needed to seek cash from the province to compensate affected landowners, he added.
Lamont County Reeve Wayne Woldanski agreed, saying that this touched on some big landowners’ rights issues that the board shouldn’t have to bear alone.
“Is the province going to be prepared to step up and be a part of the process?”
The plan also re-jigs how the capital region would be organized. Instead of having multiple priority growth areas and clustered country residential ones, the draft condenses these into three zones: core (downtown Edmonton), metropolitan (the rest of Edmonton and its surrounding cities), and rural (everywhere else).
Board members also voted last Thursday to ask the province to give them the job of planning and co-ordinating (but not running) solid waste programs in the capital region.
The board could help co-ordinate waste reduction efforts across the region and spread best practices, Crouse noted in an interview. Many local governments are already doing this through the Capital Region Waste Minimization Advisory Committee – a voluntary group unrelated to the board.
Board members will refine the draft growth plan over the next few months and put it to a vote this October.
