Last week, the St. Albert Gazette reported that council and developers are frustrated with delays.
This council is faced with a number of demands: zoning sufficient land for future industrial and commercial development, demands of developers to approve new residential development, a flood plain study and tired, old matters such as the Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan (DARP) downtown issue which should be placed on a shelf since it is mostly privately held land that should be left for the private sector to develop.
This council has been left with a non-functioning system by a previous council that dismantled a functioning municipal planning commission (MPC) and neglected to replace this body with anything else that worked. We are now faced with development projects waiting review and approval.
This new council should seriously consider bringing back the MPC and setting firm guidelines that developers would have to follow so that the MPC could conduct a review with all the factors on the table before the development project proceeds to council.
I suspect that the comments of planning director Curtis Cundy regarding Avenir not satisfying requests of council are only part of the story.
Other municipalities such as Sturgeon County insist that many important details and information is provided by the developer prior to the project being even considered by MPC. I have attended two presentations by Avenir and they just didn’t seem to have answers to such important questions as to how they were going to service their land with the as yet not clearly defined development being promoted by St. Albert Sports Village lying between Avenir and the developed portion of west St. Albert.
Bob Russell, St. Albert
