It's a good first draft, but local leaders say the province's new Municipal Government Act needs a lot of change before it's ready to become Alberta's new rulebook for cities.
The provincial government tabled the first draft of the Modernized Municipal Government Act Tuesday. The 248-page bill (the second biggest law on the books in Alberta) controls the operations of Alberta's 344 municipal governments, and affects taxation, roads, and schools.
The MGA is the guiding document that enables municipalities to do what they do, and it hasn't been updated in 20 years, said Morinville Mayor Lisa Holmes, who chairs the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association.
"We view this as a good first draft, but there are a lot of changes that need to be made."
St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse said he was excited by the draft, as it placed great emphasis on regional co-operation and the Capital Region Board (which he chairs).
The draft, if passed, would create a mandatory growth management board for the Calgary region similar to the CRB and require all communities not in those boards to create collaboration frameworks with their neighbours. Those frameworks, to be established within three years, will have to address land use, shared services, and shared funding of those services.
Shared funding used to depend on who was at the table at negotiation time, Holmes said. This change makes sharing mandatory, and backs it with arbitration. While that might mean places like Sturgeon County have to chip in more to use Morinville's libraries, it would also give them more say in the services offered by town facilities.
Crouse also approved of the draft's motion to require new councillors to attend training on how to do their jobs and follow a code of conduct, as it would bring councillors up to a standard of excellence.
Tax changes
The draft proposes to let councils charge offsite levies for new developments to fund fire halls, police stations, libraries, and rec-centres instead of just roads, sewers, and water pipes.
"The intent is that development should pay for itself," Crouse said – new subdivisions require new fire halls and libraries and should help pay for them. This change, if approved, would lead to more cash for community clubhouses and pools without higher taxes for residents.
But Holmes noted that the law also says that a development must receive 30 per cent of the benefit of a new facility before a council can charge offsite levies for it. It's unclear what this means – does it mean 30 per cent of Servus Place would have to be used by one subdivision to qualify, for example, or that 30 per cent of a subdivision would have to use Servus Place?
"The minimum is too high," she said, and would exclude most public facilities in Alberta.
Holmes said she was also disappointed the law did not include new tax powers for cities. Towns such as Banff get about three to four times their population in tourists each year, none of which pay property tax to them. These resort communities want the power to levy tourist or hotel taxes to compensate.
Crouse said he hoped future drafts of the law would let cities tax long-vacant properties at market rates, saying that it was "a joke" that spots such as the Kingswood Blvd. and Poirier Ave. sites were taxed at farm rates despite needing urban services such as sidewalks. (Those properties have been vacant for decades.)
Land use
The draft law also changes how communities create affordable housing and preserve natural areas.
The draft, if passed, would let municipalities require developers to include a certain amount of affordable housing in their new subdivisions or to pay cash or land in support of affordable housing.
Some 30,000 Albertans are on wait-lists for government-supported affordable housing, Alberta Municipal Affairs reports.
This sort of inclusionary zoning would make for more affordable homes and more diverse and engaged communities in St. Albert, said Tash Taylor of the St. Albert Housing Society – but only if governments had the courage to use it.
Instead of using municipal or environmental reserve to preserve developable but ecologically important areas (as was the case with St. Albert's white spruce forest), the draft law would have governments create conservation reserves for this purpose. Governments would have to compensate developers for land put in these reserves at fair market rates.
That's an improvement from the current system that restricts such protections to undevelopable lands such as swamps, Pamela Wight of the Edmonton and Area Land Trust said in an email. But it also assumes that municipalities understand the benefits of conserving these lands, or that they have the cash to pay fair market rates to do so.
Municipal Affairs will visit 20 communities this summer to discuss revisions to the draft. The Edmonton session is June 13 at the Chateau Louis Hotel.
Visit mgareview.alberta.ca for details on the legislation.
