St. Albert city council is now halfway through their four-year term, and the Gazette recently spoke with each member of council and asked them to reflect on the past 26 months and the decisions that were made along the way.
Mayor Cathy Heron, who will mark her seventh year as mayor in 2024, said she thinks St. Albert's representatives “have bonded as a council” since being elected in the fall of 2021.
”It's been a good term,” she said, adding, “after the election there were two new people (Coun. Shelley Biermanski, and Coun. Mike Killick) and ... we're obviously not completely bonded and all aligned — it's pretty obvious if you watch council — but for the most part, I think the strategy that we developed is good, like having downtown in our strategic plan.”
“Millennium Park and the (Business Improvement Area or BIA) are two huge successes of the downtown,” she said, referring to how council approved a new design of Millennium Park on Dec. 12, and the newly formed downtown BIA that council officially established in September.
The BIA, once it establishes its first board and annual budget next year, will represent 120 downtown businesses and will potentially develop downtown marketing and beautification strategies, as well as visitor attraction and event coordination projects. The BIA will be funded through a levy on all member businesses.
Coun. Ken MacKay also mentioned that the development of Millennium Park and the downtown BIA could spur other opportunities and investment downtown, but he pointed to another downtown project council got underway this term, the decision to donate the city-owned 22 St. Thomas Street land to Homeland Housing in the fall of 2022, as an example of council focusing on improving the downtown area.
The 1.3 acres of land now owned by Homeland Housing will eventually become a mixed-use residential and commercial development with a minimum of 55 per cent of the housing units being priced 10-20 per cent below market rates, however, construction has yet to start.
“I'm hoping that we get some federal dollars or certainly some provincial dollars to get that going because again, it gets people downtown,” MacKay said.
Another project that stood out for MacKay when looking back at the first half of the term was the planning work underway for a new potential recreation centre in the city's northeast.
The future rec-centre, referred to in city documents and conversations as the Community Amenities Site, had it's first preliminary site plan approved by council this past summer. The preliminary design of the facility features a large swimming pool, a gym, an arena, outdoor pickleball and tennis courts, an outdoor bike skills park, and more.
“We're still a ways away, but every year we're moving closer, so it was nice to make some decisions as to what it actually will look like,” MacKay said.
For Coun. Mike Killick, the first item that came to mind when reflecting on the past two years was the city's now-quashed solar farm project and the unanimous vote to not move forward with it in the fall of 2022 over concerns about financial viability.
Killick, who wasn't a councillor when the project's initial $33.75 million borrowing bylaw received first reading in the summer of 2021, said he was glad council and and administration took the time to rethink the project.
“I'm glad we asked the tough questions and asked administration to really do a deep dive and we hired some expert consultants and it turned out that the solar farm was not a viable revenue opportunity for St. Albert,” he said. “I'm glad we spent the time to really dig into it at a time when many other municipalities were just jumping on the solar bandwagon.”
While the city still needs to figure out some alternative methods of revenue generation moving forward, Killick said he thinks council needs to be “laser focused” on developing the Lakeview Business District near Big Lake.
“[It's an] opportunity to really diversify the tax base and move the burden away from the residential side and have more industrial commercial land available so that we get taxes from businesses rather than residents,” he said. “We have to stay absolutely focused on making that happen.”
The business district, once developed, will provide the space needed for an estimated 5,000 jobs. Prior to its development, however, the city will need to service the area, and although an up-to-date estimate for servicing costs hasn't been produced, Heron has previously told the Gazette she thinks it could be as much as $80 million.
Many members of council, including Coun. Wes Brodhead, mentioned the major roadwork projects that were completed (or that are still underway) over the past two years, such as phase two of the north St. Albert Trail improvement project and the first phase of construction on Villeneuve Road.
“I want to point that out because the community had to absorb a lot of congestion because of the construction,” Brodhead said. “With St. Albert Trail North we've built a roadway that takes the future into consideration, and quite honestly we've built a a nice road reflective of the character of St. Albert.”
“Ray Gibbon Drive North, it's a completely different road than it was and now it's becoming the west bypass that it was always intended to be. Now it's only halfway there to be sure, and we're hopeful that the province will bring forward money like they said they would and just continue to build going north, that would be a good thing.”
Brodhead said another key aspect of the last two years has been St. Albert's steady recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Transit started to rebound, our business started to rebound, the community started to come to life again, and it started in 2022 but I think it really came to the forefront and 2023.”
Last August the Gazette reported that St. Albert Transit saw its highest ridership volume in over three years this past spring, and it took just the first six months of 2023 to surpass ridership numbers for all of 2022.
Coun. Natalie Joly also talked about the impact of the pandemic and said it's been a challenging aspect of the term so far.
“It's been a challenging term,” she said. “We started it kind of in the thick of masking restrictions and vaccine availability and that kind of created division unlike anything I've seen before.”
“That really was the start of the term and it absolutely continues to influence our community.”
Earlier this year council approved St. Albert's new Municipal Naming Policy, a result of a motion Joly put forward in 2022, which now dictates a formal process for the city to rename existing roads, neighbourhoods, or other municipal assets.
“I think the process [to create the policy] could've been a lot faster,” Joly said, adding, “I would have liked to see us just make a decision.”
“We extended consultations which gave opportunities for a small minority of people to come out and say some pretty awful things, so that was unfortunate,” she said, referring to the 45-page report the city published in May that detailed the racist, discriminatory, and denigrating comments that residents made during the public engagement sessions prior to the policy's final draft being put forward.
Joly said she wasn't sure what to expect when the policy's process of renaming is used for the time.
Both Coun. Shelley Biermanski and Coun. Sheena Hughes said the first two years of the term showed that council needs to be more fiscally responsible moving forward.
“I stand firm that we need to improve our fiscal responsibility,” Biermanski said. “I'd just like to see the city not to be so comfortable in spending, and thinking it's an endless pot of funds.”
“We have to provide the services to the public; that's what we're there for. We're there to ensure that roads are fixed and people can afford their utilities and people can afford the taxes that will keep the community clean and have things looked after, but I think sometimes we get sidetracked on a lot of social issues that will never be settled.”
For Hughes, the highlight of the term so far has been council's effort to reduce the 2023 property tax from at least 6.1 per cent down to 4.5 per cent. The low point of the term, Hughes said, was council's inability to reduce the 5.5 property tax increase proposed and approved for next year.
“We cannot continue to have that to be an acceptable standard,” she said. “My huge disappointment is that a 5.5 per cent tax increase this year seemed perfectly acceptable to council and there's no inclination to lower it by the majority of council.”
“While 4.5 per cent last year was certainly higher than I would like, it was significantly less than what we walked in with, whereas this year, there was no motivation from the majority council to do anything except raise the taxes and not to actually take the time that is needed to try to figure out how we can work with administration to lower the [increase] and be clear that that's not an acceptable number to have moving forward.”
St. Albert's next municipal election will take place in the fall of 2025.
