More than a decade of planning, writing, reading and talking went into what St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron described as council’s top achievement in 2024.
The year was not without its challenges.
The provincial government created work and cost the city money with changes from the banning of vote tabulator machines in the coming municipal election to the hamstringing of its photo radar program and the defunding of the Edmonton Regional Metropolitan Board.
St. Albert, which voted in November to remain in Edmonton Global, will have to pay more for that privilege in future years. Like many leaders, Heron is concerned with president-elect Donald Trump’s threat of a universal 25-per-cent tariff on Canadian imports.
Finally approving the servicing of the Lakeview Business District in the city’s west in October was a deep, long-term win for St. Albert. The $78.4 million borrowing bylaw, which includes contingencies, is the largest in the city’s history.
Fully built out, Lakeview is expected to house employers that will shoulder more of the tax burden, create 5,000 new jobs and pay the development and utility fees that will help the city recoup the up-front cost of putting in the infrastructure.
Enabling this growth is not just a crowning achievement for Heron this year, but for her entire political career, year-to-date: Two terms as a councillor and two as mayor.
“When I reflect, you know next time this next year at my two terms as mayor and then my four terms on council, that will be probably the biggest thing that I will be proud of,” she said in a year-end interview with the Gazette Dec. 18. “We need industrial land. We are out. We have people knocking on the door looking for it.”
Heron remembers fondly calling into to a council meeting from a Rotary International convention in New Orleans in 2011 when they were deciding where to put the city’s next business park.
“It was just way off in the the west side of the city, and there were no pipes, nothing,” she said.
A sewer line extension that for Heron was boring in both senses of the word and amicably dubbed Project #9 inched service westward, and pandemic-era stimulus funding enabled the city to extend it under Ray Gibbon Drive to Lakeview’s doorstep.
It was a big deal then and it’s a big deal now.
“We're very excited about it,” she said. “And we did it unanimously because we have so much confidence. That piece of land will get developed quite quickly and we'll be able to service that debt without touching the taxpayers.”
Putting roads and pipes inside Lakeview “has to be our next step and it's been awesome to see how unified this council is on that.”
If you’ve got it
Showcasing what St. Albert has to offer to her colleagues in the Alberta Mid-Sized Cities Mayors’ Caucus fall meeting in October is another 2024 highlight for Heron.
Premier Danielle Smith attended a meeting with some of the mayors. In their own meeting, the mayors discussed issues of common interest including affordability, infrastructure funding, and the changes Smith’s government made this year to photo radar and municipal election rules.
Heron said the visiting leaders were “in awe of how pretty our community is.
“You know, you can hear that from our residents or you the opposite from our residents. We could hear that from provincial or federal government. But when you hear it from your colleagues who understand it so well, it was nice.”
Speaking of Bill 20
St. Albert’s resolution calling on the province to allow municipalities to use the vote-counting method of their choice in next year’s election was accepted by 86 per cent of delegates at the AbMunis annual general meeting in September.
A budget adjustment presented by city staff in November projects the 2025 election will cost close to $1 million, four times what the 2020 vote cost.
Heron said she is “100 per cent concerned about it,” adding she’s not alone.
Sean Krausert, mayor of Canmore, “has been doing a really good job” of tracking the cost implications of those recent provincial policy changes, and other cities, St. Albert included, are following suit.
“I can 100 per cent tell you that all these decisions are out of the blue,” Heron said. “The voting tabulators and ATE are completely out of the blue and now you can add the collapse of the regional boards to the list.”
She reiterated that outside of the Edmonton Regional Metropolitan Board (EMRB), former member municipalities will have to establish costly and complicated planning agreements with their neighbours.
There are other forms of downloading hitting the city’s bottom line, some more apparent than others.
Heron rhymed off a few, including the cancellation of the summer temporary employment program, the ending of grants in lieu of taxes for exempt provincial buildings, and the diverting of St. Albert Fire Services resources to respond to medical calls because “there’s not enough ambulances and paramedics on the streets.
“And they get away with this because they keep their taxes low on the backs of municipalities,” Heron said. “So it just keeps going on and on and on and with no consultation.”
Heron said the 25-per-cent tariff threat from president-elect Donald Trump concerns her on a regional basis.
“It's probably a threat to the region and that's where I generally go is my regional hat just pops on my head and even my past presidency of Alberta Municipalities. Sturgeon County's affected by some of those tariffs because of all the industrial heartland businesses, then that's not good for, you know, maybe those residents that live in St. Albert. So yeah, it does affect us for sure.
“And I don't think anybody is laughing at him anymore. They're taking his conversation with tariffs quite seriously.”
Fingers crossed
If there are New Year’s resolutions for the mayor, they include a sod-turning photo op for Lakeview, an approved borrowing bylaw to service the northeast and support for affordable housing from the province.
“I am crossing my fingers like you would not believe and I have a lot of hope that the provincial government will come through with funding for 22 St. Thomas (Street), which is our affordable housing development in our downtown.”
St. Albert applied for $14 million from the second round of the Alberta Affordable Housing Partnership Program. The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation is chipping in about $5 million, and the city’s contribution is around $6 million including land and cash.
“I think our development checks every box that they're looking for, so they just ran out of money (in the first intake). We've changed our land use files to get rid of parking restrictions. We've done everything they've asked. So now we're just waiting.”
Heron has hope that council will finally pull the trigger on increasing infrastructure capacity in the growing northeast. She said the cost estimate has exploded from $20 million to $70 million.
“We’ll have to figure that out early in ‘25 if we're going to fund that pipe or not,” she said. "And if we don't, then we're going to have to figure out how to allow development to occur in in Erin Ridge North and Jensen Lakes because they have no sewer capacity.
"So that's going to be a tough one, but it's an important one and I don't know how we're going to do it yet.”
