Now that Avenir has received council's endorsement, Mayor Nolan Crouse is pledging to ensure its proponents keep their promises.
"The public interest needs to get taken care of," Crouse said.
He's going to be watching to ensure the developer delivers its promised mix of residential and non-residential development, sticks to its commitment to pay for servicing up front, cleans up a landfill that holds construction waste, adheres to setbacks from Carrot Creek and properly develops its stormwater ponds, Crouse said.
Rampart-Avenir received council approval Monday to proceed with further planning for a mixed-use commercial and residential development in the city's northwest corner. The project had been seeking an amendment to the city's municipal development plan. With that approval in place the next step is the formation of a more detailed area structure plan.
Crouse said he's also going to be watching to make sure Rampart Avenir delivers the various technology aspects of the project they've touted as a $1.8-billion future hub of cutting-edge technology.
When the project first became public two years ago, the vision was to develop a hub of clean technology in five sectors: local energy production, water recovery and reuse, local food production, advanced building materials and vehicle energy infrastructure.
"It will be the largest industrial platform, industrial campus, for clean technology certainly in North America," said project manager David Bromley on May 30, 2009.
For the last several months the focus has been on a partnership with networking giant Cisco Systems to include a data utility. Along with infrastructure like power, water and sewage, the area will be wired to provide high speed, high volume transfer of electronic data.
Rampart Avenir proponents feel this service will make the area attractive to people and businesses who rely on moving large amounts of data, such as designers and engineers.
The data utility is an aspect the city can watch closely, as it would be included in the servicing plan that's part of the next stage, said city manager Bill Holtby.
The concept received an endorsement from the Alberta Center for Analytics Products, a new organization that wants to encourage the growth of an analytics industry in Alberta. Analytics is the practice of extracting useful knowledge from vast amounts of data, the organization said. The organization wants to be an Avenir tenant, council heard.
Recent discussions in council chambers about Avenir have also brought reference to geothermal heating, solar panels and electric cars.
This generated frustration on the part of Coun. Cam MacKay, who asked Monday night why he should vote for the Avenir concept, "when every week there's something new that comes to the table."
In a later interview, he said that council's job at this early stage was simply to decide how to designate land uses between residential, commercial and industrial. He said all the tech-talk was actually a distraction.
"It's a sales pitch. That's the only real purpose," he said.
Chamber reacts
The St. Albert Chamber of Commerce wasn't happy that council approved Rampart Avenir because the decision will put residential development on land thought to be desirable for light industrial.
"Avenir has led this city council step by step in exactly the direction they wanted them to go," said chamber chair Charlene Zoltenko.
She said council didn't listen to business groups and city administration, who urged for a decision that would foster more business investment in the city.
"They followed the path of many city councils before them," she said.
