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Roads with special events may get priority for repairs

Roadways and other public facilities that play host to special events in St. Albert may be considered more of a priority for repairs, maintenance, or replacement in the years to come.
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Parts of St. Albert that host special events, such as Perron Street downtown for marathons and the Farmers' Market, may be considered a higher priority for repairs moving forward. FILE/Photo

St. Albert roadways and other public facilities that host roughly 90 annual community events such as the Soap Box Derby may be a higher priority for repairs, maintenance, or replacement in the years to come.

On July 16 city council approved a motion by Coun. Mike Killick amending the city's Asset Management Policy to include a section that requires administration to factor “social value” into their annual repair, maintain, replace (RMR) budget and planning process, specifically referring to the social value of special events.

Every spring, council is presented with an RMR budget — which covers spending to repair, maintain, or replace existing city infrastructure and equipment — ahead of the upcoming year's overall budget to determine how much the city can spend on non-maintenance related projects, which are generally referred to as growth projects and are considered secondary to the successful functioning of the city.

Killick's motion stemmed from a recent council decision during the 2025 RMR budget deliberations not to repave the St. Vital Avenue hill in time for next year's St. Albert Soap Box Derby, as requested by the event's organizers and proposed by Killick. The hill is not scheduled to be repaved until 2029, but Killick argued it should be repaved sooner for the safety and enjoyment of participants in the annual event.

With Killick's new motion receiving council support, administration will be tasked with considering the social value of special events and their locations while using its "prioritization matrix." The matrix is a framework and formula used to calculate how important a project is, whether it is an RMR project or a growth project.

The more important a project is, the more likely it will be funded in an annual budget.

During debate, Killick said he understood his previous motion to have the St. Vital Avenue hill repaved sooner than planned failed to gain the support from the rest of council because it was making a one-off change, rather than a system-wide change, which many on council said in June was a better way to govern.

“This was kind of stepping back from doing it ad hoc to [allow] administration to have enough time to add this in as one criteria — one of many I'm sure — that would or could influence the prioritization of one project or another,” Killick said. “I hope that doing it this way ... still achieves a more holistic approach, rather than a one-off kind of ad hoc, 'around the water cooler' type discussion.”

An administrative report about Killick's motion says special events are informally included in the prioritization matrix already, but making special events consideration a more concrete factor will be complicated, and those considerations may not be significant enough to make an impact.

“There is an additional challenge with accommodating events to influence future year RMR [budget planning], as it may alter the level of service defined for the primary use/objective of [a] particular asset,” the report says. “For example, the primary objective of a road asset is for multimodal mobility and accessibility. Special events accommodation is a secondary objective.”

The city's prioritization matrix has different measures for different types of city-owned infrastructure, the report says.

“For example, transportation assets are prioritized based on engineering best practices and condition-based assessments. In contrast, park amenities such as park benches or waste receptacles may be prioritized based on age only.”

The report also says roads are assessed based mainly on what condition they are in. For example, in a case where a road that doesn't generally host special events is in worse condition than a road that does, but both are scheduled to be repaired in the same year, it's possible the worse-off road would still be repaired first.

Killick said on Tuesday he recognizes the complexity of what he was asking for, which is why he changed his motion to only include special event considerations in the standards section of the Asset Management Policy, rather than continue with his original motion to have administration develop detailed criteria to be included in the prioritization matrix itself. That approach could have taken over a year to do and require $60,000 in consultant spending.

“When I saw the complexity of the number of projects and all of the departments that would be involved, I didn't want to add new work to teams that are already maxed out,” he said. “Council [is] setting a high-level strategy — 'please consider stakeholder engagement and social value in your prioritization matrix'  — [so this will] set that high-level strategic goal, and we step back and let administration do their thing on a daily basis.”

“That gets us out of a administration role and lets them do their job that they know best.”

Coun. Ken MacKay, the only member of council to vote against the motion, said the motion was unnecessary because administration already considers special events in developing annual RMR budgets and projects.

“This seems redundant to me,” he said. “If we do nothing, it's already going to be happening through this whole process.”

“I'm comforted by knowing that administration is really looking at this already, because it's a slippery slope for us to start meddling in [administrative work] in relation to what goes in a prioritization matrix.”

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