Sturgeon County has agreed to give its towns some $2.1 million a year for recreation so its residents can have equal access to libraries and arenas.
County council voted 6-1 (Coun. Karen Shaw opposed) March 23 to approve recreation cost-sharing agreements with Bon Accord, Gibbons, Legal, Morinville and Redwater.
The deals were among a long list of intermunicipal agreements approved that day between the county and its towns, and now must be approved by the councils of those five towns.
Recreation funding has long been a sticking point in Sturgeon County. The county runs few of its own facilities, so its residents often head into the county’s towns for recreation. Since those residents don’t pay taxes to those towns, the towns have criticized the county for not paying its fair share of the cost to provide those residents with recreation.
The county has signed recreation cost-sharing agreements with the towns in the last few decades to address this issue. The most recent one, which expired in December 2020, saw the county contribute a set amount of operational funding to a town if it had specific facilities, such as a pool or curling rink, plus about $25 per county resident in a community’s catchment area. In 2016, this meant the county paid the towns about $635,000 for recreation (around $247,000 for Morinville).
More bucks, more strings
County and town officials started work on new five-year deals last June, county intergovernmental services manager Jennifer Lavallee told council.
The new deals cover operational and capital costs. Under them, Sturgeon County would pay the towns about $2.1 million a year for recreation, with payments rising in line with inflation (or by at least two per cent) each year until 2025. Some 39 per cent (about $835,000) of this money would go to Morinville.
Lavallee told council these payments are based on population, recreational assets, catchment areas and regional comparators, and are in line with the regional average at about $225 per county resident.
The deals require town and county residents to pay the same rates and have the same access to regional recreational programs, facilities and services, regardless of where they live.
That equal access provision clashed with the Town of Morinville’s Morinville Advantage policy, which gives town residents access to tickets to free, town-run events three days before anyone else. Town spokesperson Tracy Dalzell-Heise said in an interview that administration is still examining the deal’s implications for this policy.
The old deal did not have any cost-sharing provisions for how facilities were to be built or operated, Lavallee said. The new deals require the towns and the county to create joint asset management processes by the end of 2023 that cover the operation and replacement of current and future recreation facilities.
Morinville in particular is to strike a joint committee with Sturgeon County if either party wants to start a new joint recreation service. That committee would study the cost, funding and operation of that service before either party would pursue it.
The new deals create joint capital replacement reserves to which the county and the towns each contribute $50,000 a year. Each town would control their own reserve, but would have to give the county a plan on how they would use any money in it within five years of getting that cash.
The new deals require the towns to provide annual reports on how they used the county’s recreation money and to publicly acknowledge the county’s recreation support through signs and other means.
Rewrite ahead
The towns and the county agreed they still have a number of issues to work out on recreation, particularly since they don’t know which residents are using which facilities, county commissioner Reegan McCullough said.
The new deals stated that the towns and the county are to track the residency of the people using their recreational facilities by April 1, 2023, and use that data to create a new recreation funding model by Jan. 1, 2024. Lavallee said this tracking would take place over several years to account for the pandemic, which might otherwise skew results.
Coun. Kristin Toms said these deals and the county’s new intermunicipal collaboration frameworks (ICFs) would give the county a say in what gets built or fixed in the towns.
“I know there were a lot of county residents who were not happy with the decision of Morinville to put up a recreation centre and our concerns that we would have to pay for another municipality’s decisions,” she said.
“These ICFs enable us to have a voice.”
While she agreed with the amount of money distributed, Coun. Karen Shaw disagreed with its allocation, saying it was unfair to divvy up this money based on catchment areas without accounting for the amenities in those areas.
Coun. Neal Comeau said he hopes these agreements would put an end to people criticizing out-of-towners for using local facilities.
“Let’s live together and work together and recreate together.”
The deals now go before the councils of the five towns for approval.
