The development community wants to spread the word that St. Albert is a great place to live.
Various players in the residential development sector have banded together to initiate an advertising campaign to promote St. Albert as a preferred place to build within the Capital region.
“We just want to strike out an advertising campaign to tell metropolitan Edmonton that St. Albert is a great place to live,” said Coun. James Burrows.
Burrows is city council’s representative on a new sub-committee that emerged from a think-tank session held about a month ago. The discussion, which included many players in the development community, centred around ways to jump-start residential development in the city.
The group’s first planned action is to mount an ad campaign between September and November. It’s to include a new website called My St. Albert, Burrows said.
The group is still working to identify what attributes it wants to highlight as making St. Albert stand out within the region.
Financing for the campaign will come from voluntary contributions from players in the development community, said Pierre Sareault, a St. Albert resident who is sales manager for Reid-Built Homes.
Over the long term, there are many issues the development community feels need addressing in order to retain and attract St. Albert residents, he said. These issues include the levels of fees and levies, which developers feel are high. But the intent of this group is to focus on one issue at a time and effect change.
“Breaking it down into smaller, more manageable pieces is a great approach and easier for a group of people to wrap their heads around,” Sareault said.
The group doesn’t yet know how much the campaign will cost. The city doesn’t know whether it will contribute.
“We haven’t decided yet whether we’re going to put any money toward it,” said Mayor Nolan Crouse. “We don’t have any money in the budget for it.”
The ad campaign is distinct from the city’s branding initiative, which is still in the works after starting earlier this year, Crouse said.
The residential development sector began to experience a slowdown last year and has been hit by the recent economic downturn. Besides these factors, the city has also seen its proportion of Edmonton-area development slip in recent years, to 1.1 per cent last year compared to 3.3 per cent in 2004, said George Cantalini of Beaverbrook Developments in a speech earlier this year.
Cantalini agrees that there are many issues to address but is committed to the advertising campaign as a first step.
“There’s no guarantee that that’s going to happen at this point,” he said. “The intent is to try to get enough interest.”
