St. Albert and the capital region have to do a lot more if they want to rein in urban sprawl, suggests a new report.
The Capital Region Board received a report Thursday on its monitoring and reporting indicators. The 16 indicators are meant to track the region’s progress towards completing its growth plan.
The goal here is to limit urban sprawl, says board chair and St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse.
“The more sprawl you have, the higher your costs, the more agricultural land disappears and the less food supply you have,” he says.
The board has set density targets for different parts of the capital region and required all new area structure and municipal development plans to meet them.
The report notes that St. Albert is pretty far from its long-range density target. It’s sitting at about 17.71 dwelling units per net residential hectare today, and is supposed to eventually get to about 30 to 45 under the growth plan.
We’ve grandfathered our current low-density society into this plan, says Crouse, when asked about this figure. As all 36 of the residential plans approved by the board so far will meet the board’s density targets, the region should become more compact over time. Developments such as the new towers at Grandin mall, while disliked by some, would also shrink the city’s footprint.
The report finds that greenhouse gases as measured by vehicle fuel sales in nine communities (including St. Albert) have risen unchecked in the capital region in recent years, hitting about 4.45 megatonnes in 2014 – about 24 per cent more than in 2010.
That’s likely due to the fact that the vast majority of residents still get to work by car. The report found that about 85 per cent of St. Albert residents drive to work, with just six per cent using transit and 0.3 per cent using bikes. City residents took about 20.7 minutes to get to work as a result – a fair bit quicker than the regional average of 24.85.
Board chief executive officer Malcolm Bruce said some of these indicators would be changed or dropped as part of the board’s revisions to its growth plan, which are set to be unveiled this October. They will otherwise be tracked annually.
The report is available at capitalregionboard.ab.ca.
