Salt and the arts were in the docket this week as council questioned a long list of funding requests in this year's budget.
City council plugged through a long list of funding requests from city staff and community groups Thursday as part of its ongoing talks on the 2012 budget. About 11 groups, including the St. Albert Seniors' Club and the public library, lined up to tell council why their allocations should not be cut.
Salt, again
In a repeat of last year's debate, council has proposed cutting funds used by the Office of the Environment to monitor salt contamination of the Sturgeon River from the old public works yard.
The city has monitored the yard's old salt dump since about 1999. The yard is leaching salt into the groundwater and the Sturgeon River, and Alberta Environment has given the city written direction to "control migration of salt from the historic area of impact to the river environment" to ensure it does not adversely affect the river.
When administration asked last year for cash to monitor the yard for three years, council gave them enough to do it for one. This year, staffers have asked for about $26,500 a year to keep this monitoring going until 2014.
Mayor Nolan Crouse asked if the city could cancel this funding. "If we don't do it … are we in non-compliance?"
The province has asked the city to watch the salt, environmental manager Leah Jackson said in an interview, and not doing so would put it at risk of fines.
"One of council's high priorities is the health of the Sturgeon River," she added, and this site could have a big impact on it — groundwater at the site has about 10,000 parts per million of salt in it, which is about 40 times the limit set out in federal and provincial guidelines.
A study is underway to determine the best way to clean up the site, Jackson said, which could mean repurchasing and excavating it. Even if that happened, the province would still likely require some monitoring to prove the excavation got all the salt. "Until we can show there is no more adverse effect [on the river], we will be monitoring that site."
Coun. Wes Brodhead flagged this item for further discussion at a later meeting.
The price of arts
City administration has recommended that council give the Arts and Heritage Foundation $1,364,900 in 2012 —$125,000 more than this year — in order to cover wage hikes. The group had also asked for $32,400 to keep renting a wheelchair-accessible space on Perron Street for its art classes.
Coun. Cam MacKay asked why the foundation wanted to raise its wages. "Doesn't somebody have to be at the bottom of the spread in terms of pay?"
It's a retention issue, said board member Edith Finczak. "Staff at Arts and Heritage do [this job] more for the love of the job than they do for the pay," she said, and this latest hike would bring them up to 2008 levels of pay. "You can be at the bottom of the scale, but you get entry-level staff."
The foundation employs about 24 people, said board chair Alan Murdock, five of whom have master's degrees. "This is a highly qualified staff," he said, one that reaches about 32,000 people a year with its programs.
Brodhead agreed, noting that a doctor working in Edmonton would expect to get paid the same while working here. "We have difficulty drawing people to St. Albert and the Musée [Heritage Museum] because we don't pay appropriately," he said. He moved to have the foundation's $32,400 request for its Perron Street office added to the budget.
Automatic librarian?
The St. Albert Library also provided details on its pitch for an automatic book-sorting system.
The library lends out about 900,000 items a year, said library board chair Kelly Aisenstat, each of which has to be scanned and sorted by hand on return. "This results in thousands of hours of staff time doing mindless and repetitive tasks," he said — time that could be better spent serving customers.
The library has asked the city for $500,840 in capital to build a new RFID book-sorter, which would scan books as they were dropped off and sort them by conveyor belt into the appropriate bin.
MacKay asked staff to come back with specific details on the life-cycle costs of this system and its potential savings.
Budget discussions resume Tuesday at 3 p.m.
