St. Albert city council is looking to take some of the politics out of its decision-making on building new recreation, culture and sporting facilities.
Following a closed-door meeting April 29, council approved using an arithmetical model to help determine what large facilities will be needed over the next 20 years, and approved having staff engage the public about that plan over the next several months.
Mayor Nolan Crouse explained the system employs a decision-making method based on facts and figures, by comparing the number of existing facilities in St. Albert to benchmarks of other similar communities around Alberta and around Canada.
“What we’re doing now is comparing ourselves against all the benchmarks,” he said. “What’s wrong with the current approach is it’s all politics, it’s whoever can lobby the hardest against council.”
Monique St. Louis, the director of Build St. Albert who brought the plan forward to council, said right now decisions are made about new facilities beginning with facility operators presenting a business case for the proposal to the city, which would then be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Under the model that’s been approved, there are hard figures about what the city has and what other comparable cities have that will be used to inform decisions about future needs.
“What this does is provides an equal playing ground for everybody,” she said. “It takes everyone’s personal views out of the equation as a starting point.”
St. Louis said while it’s too early to provide specific dates for the public consultation process, she has a tentative timeline set out in four stages.
Consultations with current major facility operators will begin in May. From May to July she will meet with major infrastructure users, such as the St. Albert Minor Hockey Association. Then, from July to September, casual facility users will be surveyed about preferences and needs and priorities. Finally, in August and September, there will be a telephone survey of the community at large.
“The intent behind it is really to provide a consistently applied approach to determining future needs of facilities,” she said. “And that’s really the power of the new facility model that was developed; it’s a consistent methodology.”
St. Louis explained city staff recommended to council that discussions about the model and the facility plan be held behind closed doors because council needed time to have a frank discussion about its priorities.
“They needed some time to talk through as a collective, some of the current projects, some of the future projects, what were their personal views about it,” she said.
Crouse said it was important to be able to have those discussions in private because to have them in public would open up the possibility of having large groups of people attend the meetings in an attempt to sway the decisions one way or the other.
“These are $10 (million) and $20 million decisions, and we had to be able to have some frank conversations without sitting in a fish bowl,” he said.
Typically, municipal councils only go in camera to discuss matters related to land, legal or labour.
