St. Albert’s effort to right the property tax ship by creating a new industrial park has run aground, or in this case, sunk in a muddy creek.
It’s somewhat fitting that, one week before setting this year’s property tax rate, city council vetoed plans for a new industrial park in the northwest near Carrot Creek. The move was a blow to the city’s goal of lightening the property tax load for homeowners and a major victory for local landowners with a completely different vision for the area.
In the end it was the landowners, specifically Rampart Avenir and SAS Sports and Entertainment that won the day, owing to a smart public relations strategy that turned a debate about the property tax burden into an environmental crusade to save poor old Carrot Creek. By backing down council once again showed that city goals and policy can bend to the will of a determined developer.
It’s an old story in St. Albert, where as recently as three years ago a developer’s resistance to industrial paved the way for high-rise residential towers, low-rises and a shopping centre in South Riel. Heritage Lakes is home to 4,000 residents today but it too was supposed to be an industrial area. Council flirted with the idea of industrial northeast of Erin Ridge, however those plans were also scrapped when it proved unpopular with local landowners, including Landrex.
The 280-hectare (700 acre) industrial park near Carrot Creek was based on advice from a council committee to facilitate more industrial in the annexed lands. The one problem with that idea is industrial zoning goes against St. Albert’s entire argument for annexation and doesn’t jive with the intermunicipal development plan (IDP) with Sturgeon County.
The current council has spent considerable energy trying to get Sturgeon on board with the industrial concept, to the point where the city was willing to turn a blind eye to two acreage developments on St. Albert’s doorstep.
But even after those challenges the concept didn’t sit well with the local landowners, including Avenir, which has proposed a $1.8-billion ‘clean tech’ development of residential and urban villages nestled around a centre for business innovation. The Avenir group portrayed itself as the sustainable choice for the area despite providing few details about the ‘clean’ technologies it plans to use in a development that even its principles say could result in traditional suburban housing if that’s what the market wants. Avenir also used the city’s own studies to show St. Albert already has decades worth of industrial land at its disposal.
It worked like a charm, emphasized when Coun. Carol Watamaniuk harkened industrial in the area as planning straight out of the “Dark Ages.” While putting industry next to a creek does sound dated, rejecting the idea outright after years of work leaves council with a rather empty economic development mantle, just in time for an election. That’s a shame since the eastern portion of the site at least makes good sense for a business park: it’s next to two former landfills and Ray Gibbon Drive, the future Highway 2 and connects to the ring road, giving it prime transportation access.
Lost in this debate was the argument that land alone won’t lead to industrial development. If that was the case, south St. Albert would be a thriving industrial area. Absorption rates only tell part of the story; council needs to have the resolve to ensure industry ‘joins us’ here in St. Albert. It’s worked with some success in recent years in Campbell Park, where council played a hands-on role. It could work along Ray Gibbon Drive with similar leadership from council. With property taxes going out in the mail at the end of the month, taxpayers could use some relief.
Bryan Alary is an editor at the Gazette. Read his Civic Matters blog at www.stalbertgazette.com.
