Last week + Meetings June 7, 2022
Last week highlights
City of St. Albert Staff Safety Appreciation BBQ: It was wonderful to sit out in the sun eating with City staff for the first time since shutdowns started. Thank you to everyone for their hard work through the challenges of the last couple years!
Youth Advisory Committee Meeting: Meeting with the St. Albert Youth Advisory Committee is one of my favourite parts of this job. Each time we meet, their energy, drive, and thoughtfulness makes me excited for our future with these leaders at the helm. This month, we heard a presentation from Active Communities about their plans for a non-profit skating/sports facility, and discussed a few items that will come to Council meetings in the next few weeks. They also accepted my offer of a tour of Council chambers!
Grand Opening of Coalmine Road Community Garden: Congratulations to the Coalmine Road Community Garden on their official grand opening, almost 27 years after one of these shovels was used to break ground next door at the Christ Community Church! Most of the garden plots are already rented, but there are still a few left for anyone wanting to plant this year.
Agenda highlights
Our meeting has been bumped to Tuesday, I believe to ensure that any members of Council attending the FCM conference in Regina have time to return to attend. We’re also starting the day with the second half of a workshop called “Planning, Development and Engineering 101” - I’m not able to attend, but anyone can watch the recording on YouTube if they’re interested in understanding the city’s planning processes.
Erin Ridge North - Public Hearings
This is for changes to the Land Use Bylaw & Area Structure Plan to propose:
• adjusting the boundaries of one medium density residential and one high density residential site, so that they better align with the road network,
• removing a small low density residential parcel adjacent to the high density site,
• redistributing the low density units along the local roadway, and
• realigning one local road, moving it slightly south.
Removals from the 10-year capital plan
The following project removals from the capital plan have been proposed by individual members of Council:
Sediment and Erosion Control ($3M): Administration have advised that passing this motion “would result in short-term cost savings…. However, the Stormwater Infrastructure Rehabilitation budget would need to be expanded to address… sediment removal. The goal of continuing to reduce the amount of City sediment and debris from reaching the Sturgeon River would not advance in a cost-effective manner, resulting in either higher costs for Utilities customers or no reduction in debris and sediment in the Sturgeon River, which may result in substantial financial penalties to the City from federal and provincial government agencies.”
Stormwater Utility Master Plan: Administration have advised that passing this motion “would result in short-term cost savings in utility rates (insignificant)... However, in the long-term there would be cost implications for the City and for developers [because] both oversizing and undersizing stormwater infrastructure have significant cost implications for the City and the development community…”
Sanitary Utility Master Plan: Administration have advised that passing this motion would result in the “sanitary model… not be[ing] fully updated to account for growth that has occurred since the last… update. Regularly updated UMPs allow faster and more accurate development circulation response times. In the absence of updated UMPs, additional staffing would gradually need to be added to address the gaps in infrastructure planning, to update the City's sanitary model and to provide timely responses to developers [and] developers would be required to provide more/larger engineering submissions. This would result in the duplication of effort for developers and… would also result in less collaboration between developers to reduce their servicing costs by working together. Ultimately, the City would inherit infrastructure that is more costly to maintain (additional lift stations and additional sanitary lines) which would result in higher utility rates.”
Water Utility Master Plan: The administrative response to this removal is almost identical to that for the Sanitary UMP, including a comment that “utility rates are derived based on a 10 year operating and capital plan, therefore moving this activity to a future year within the 10 year window has no effect on utility rates”.
Public Works Mobile Equipment Replacement Plan: Admin have advised that passing this motion “would eliminate the purchase of equipment and vehicles to replace those which have reached the end of their service life. The impact would lead to additional operational costs (contracting, materials and staffing to maintain items past their serviceable life) for the Fleet branch of Public Operations and/or not having serviceable equipment and vehicles to meet service level needs of the departments. [Should this expense be delayed to 2024, it] would lead to… additional funding [requirements] in 2024 to make up for the previous year's shortfall as well as an increase to the 2023 fleet operational budget to allow for additional costs of maintaining aged equipment and vehicles.”
Transit Bus Lifecycle Replacement Plan: The impact would be similar to the Public Works replacement plan, although this proposal might spur conversation about the proposed model of the new regional transit commission.
Information Technology (IT) Office Automation: “If passed, this motion will remove the annual funding that is required to purchase minor, emergent office automation hardware and software on behalf of all City departments throughout the year. For example, computers, tablets, laptops, mobile phones, monitors or additional licenses for business applications or productivity software… [and] City departments would revert to the expenditure of funds from departmental budgets without involving IT Services, resulting in the haphazard acquisition of possibly incompatible IT systems, software and peripherals that may compromise financial management, operational efficiencies and/or cyber security.”
Information Technology (IT) Lifecycle Replacement Plan: “If passed, this motion will remove the annual funding [required for replacing] information technology (IT) assets used by the City including all desk phones and the City phone system, all mobile phones, all components of the City network, servers, storage devices, computers, laptops, tablets, printers, copiers, plotters, projectors, monitors, software, point of sale equipment and cyber security devices.”
Collaborative Economic Development grant
This is to allow the CAO to accept a $450,000 grant from the province “to support the development of the Collaborative Economic Development framework, [which is an] initiative… supported by all thirteen municipalities within the Edmonton Metropolitan Region”.
Green Bin Contamination Reduction
In some loads, we suspect that contamination with non-compostable items in our green bin program is over 50% which exceeds the 30% contamination limit set out in our agreement with our contractor. When loads exceed this percentage, we are “charged as if this were a load of garbage ($52.00/MT) rather than organic material ($46.00/MT)”. Of note, “From June 2021 through April 2022, just under 7,000MT of organic material was collected… with just over 4,000MT being composted, and just under 3,000MT (41%) being landfilled… [and] 97% of organic loads were landfilled in February 2022”. This motion is to direct Administration to come up with a plan to address this issue, which is already being done through a contract to conduct a waste study and a resulting report and recommendations to come to Council in Q1 2023. I suspect this motion will pass because it doesn’t impact administrative activities, and shows our support for Admin’s existing plans.
Non-Residential Recreation User Fees
My guess is that this will be the hot-button debate of the meeting. If passed, we would direct administration create non-resident fees for recreation (swimming & skating lessons, memberships, etc.) for residents of municipalities without an agreement regarding collaboration on these services; Effectively, this would only impact residents of Sturgeon County as we already have agreements with Edmonton and others.
This is a brief and incomplete overview of my activities as a councillor and Council meetings, with my personal comments sprinkled in - In no way are my opinions representative of the official direction of council or the City of St. Albert. Please let me know of any typos or errors. Residents can register to speak if they have information to present to council. Full agenda packages can be found on the stalbert.ca website.
