St. Albert’s task force to manage the city’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted many applicants, although the task force’s goals have yet been decided, and is a model that is already being adopted elsewhere in the Edmonton region.
In an interview with the Gazette, Mayor Cathy Heron said expected deliverables from the task force have yet to be determined, since committee members themselves will decide the checklist for local recovery.
“I'm not going to presuppose anything because I want them to figure that out,” she said, adding St. Albert city council spoke about recovery being complete when St. Albert is back to being the best place in Canada to live.
When asked how that will be measured, Heron said she does not think it can, but timelines will be determined after the committee comes up with their own set of deliverables.
Committee members will also create their own terms of reference during their initial meetings.
In April, city council began the process of forming a task force that will guide economic and social recovery for local businesses and community organizations. Applications for members of the public to sit on the task force remain open until Friday, May 8.
Specifics regarding the cost of the task force aren’t known, but any funding it will require will come out of the $2 million council has allocated to St. Albert’s COVID-19 costs.
St. Albert has already received 14 applications from people hoping to assist the city’s recovery efforts, Heron said. Heron will chair the task force and two other members of council will sit on it, along with up to seven members of the public.
Heron said she personally sent invitation letters to a variety of people, including small business owners and people in the development industry.
“They are completely from all walks of life in St. Albert and very balanced, so that's what we'll be looking for,” she said.
According to its bylaw, the task force will consult with groups across St. Albert, including residential, commercial and non-profit sectors, and will make policy and legislative recommendations to council for how to help parts of the community recover from COVID-19.
The task force’s meetings will be open to the public, although members can move in camera if they need to.
Since St. Albert’s move toward recovery, other municipalities across the region have followed St. Albert’s lead, including the City of Leduc.
St. Albert corporate communications and design manager Cory Sinclair said in an email St. Albert distributed its concept recovery plan to all 13 municipalities in the region.
Leduc acting city manager Mike Pieters said in an interview they used St. Albert’s concept recovery plan as a template to formulate Leduc’s own, which has been tweaked to suit their needs.
Rather than encompassing all aspects of economic and social recovery under a single external-facing committee – as St. Albert is doing – Pieters said Leduc opted to separate those components into two separate external task forces. One will handle everything business and economic related and the other will cover off all community services issues.
He said Leduc felt the needs for both of the committees are different, and they wanted to deploy subject matter experts to serve on committees unique to their expertise.
“By separating the two of them, I think we can be focused on those particular environments to support the recovery as quickly as possible,” Pieters said.
For St. Albert, Heron said she believes in integrating all components of recovery under a single task force.
“You can't work on the social side without trying to get money in their pockets, so jobs are completely laced with mental health and such, so I want ours to be integrated,” she said.
While St. Albert’s task force will not begin meeting until the end of May, Leduc’s committees have already begun preparations for when health restrictions begin lifting.
“We understand that people are getting very stressed being in this sort of an environment, and I think they need to see some actions by the city that we're ready to open as soon as some of these restrictions start coming off,” Pieters said.
A key component of Leduc’s third, internal-facing, committee comprised of city senior leadership will be preparing the city to open its facilities the day provincial regulations allow them to, Mayor Bob Young said. If Alberta officials announce on a Monday restriction are going to be lifted, Young said Leduc wants to ensure facilities are prepared to open their doors on Tuesday.
For example, that includes beginning to install Plexiglas shields in civic facilities to prevent the spread of COVID-19 during interactions between city workers and members of the public.
In addition, Leduc city council wanted to ensure the task force would not be “another set of red tape,” Young said.
“I'm really confident that the task forces that we put in place are going to help the city get back to normal.”
It is hard to put an end date on recovery until a sense of what the “new normal” is gleaned, Young said, but the ultimate goal is to make it as easy as possible for businesses and residents to access the services they require.
