With less than one year left in his city council term, Cam MacKay says his focus will continue to be on efforts to make council more accountable.
Now in his second term on St. Albert city council, MacKay said he sees his biggest accomplishments in his one-on-one interactions with residents. He finds it rewarding to help city residents.
“It kind of gives you a nice feeling at the end of the day,” he said.
As one example, he said this year his most satisfying experience was being able to help a resident navigate the land-use bylaw and appeal process to be able to run a dog-grooming business out of her Sturgeon Heights home.
In addition to the personal interactions, MacKay noted two specific accomplishments inside council chambers – although both still require work to get finished.
The first is his efforts to get council to create an internal auditor position, to have someone answering directly to council providing perspective on how the city is run. He started pushing for this during his first term in office.
“I’m hoping that leaves a legacy of financial accountability to a future council,” he said.
MacKay also said his work in bringing forward a motion to re-establish a municipal planning commission in the city would help give residents more of a voice in how the city grows and develops.
“Since I was first elected we’ve had a lot of disputes about land use planning issues in the city, and we still do,” he said. “I thought the best way to resolve that is you let people have some kind of say in the process.”
As a group, MacKay said council’s biggest accomplishment far and away is the decision about who will lead the organization.
Council decided to part ways with former city manager Patrick Draper in May, and hired Kevin Scoble to the position. He is slated to begin work in January.
He said Draper “wasn’t a good fit.” MacKay believes Scoble will lead the organization well, and help ensure the various long-term master plans council has approved this term will be appropriately followed up.
“He’s modest, he’s humble, he’s extremely bright and he’s got a lot of experience,” MacKay said. “He’s got the skills to excel.”
While he sees several challenges that exist on city council, he said those challenges tend to come with significant benefit as well.
The biggest challenge he noted is the process of what he described as “amoeba football,” wherein councillors slowly but surely must push for the changes they want to see, ultimately changing the mind of those who are opposing their position.
On this term specifically MacKay said this has required a lot of work, as councillors don’t always see eye to eye.
“The challenge, but also the strength, is we’ve got a lot of good people with good ideas and strong opinions,” he said. “If you harness that the right way, that can be a real positive.”
This council has wrestled with “moral and ethical issues” including Draper’s city-funded lawsuit against a resident and his decision to hire former councilor Gilles Prefontaine to a senior leadership position with the city. But those efforts have resulted in some positive change including a council policy to prevent that kind of hiring in future.
“These aren’t easy things to deal with,” he said. “Councils are always best at dealing with the happy-go-lucky stuff where you slap each other on the back and say ‘We’re visionaries,’ but these things have to be dealt with too.”
In the last year on council, MacKay said he plans to keep pushing for the internal auditor position and for the establishment of a municipal planning commission. As a group one of the biggest loose ends that city council needs to tie up has to do with Sturgeon County and the off-site levies the city charges.
He said he’s concerned that without a proper boundary-growth agreement in place, the city is at significant financial risk. The city currently charges developers off-site levies to pay for major infrastructure like sewer lines, but MacKay said the city is charging as if it has already annexed land from Sturgeon County for future growth.
If the city cannot annex the land in question and subsequently charges off-site levies to those developing that land, then the rates the city charges may prove to be too low to recoup the cost of the projects leaving the city’s taxpayers on the hook.
“The longer we charge lower rates and don’t get this area under our control, it’s a big risk,” he said. “If we screw this up, that could cause financial hardship for a long, long time.”
