Morinville Mayor Lloyd Bertschi is floating an idea that could cost him and every other mayor in the region their jobs.
Bertschi broached the idea last week during a joint council meeting between Morinville and St. Albert of creating a specialized municipality in the region, bringing all the area’s municipalities under one umbrella.
Currently, St. Albert, Sturgeon County, Morinville, Legal, Redwater, Gibbons and Bon Accord all have separate municipal councils and administrations. A specialized municipality could eliminate all of them.
Strathcona County is already a specialized municipality with several communities, including Ardrossan, Josephburg, Cooking Lake and Sherwood Park all represented in one municipal government.
Bertschi said that, partially through his work with the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and the Capital Region Board, he started to think there would be some merit to the idea and he wants to see what other communities think.
“Perhaps we should stick our toe in the water to see if there is any appetite whatsoever for a specialized municipality,” he said. “Without spending a whole lot of effort and dollars it is worth looking at to see what would be the big challenges.”
Bertschi said when he looks next door in Strathcona County, he sees a municipality that is better able to plan out their broader community.
“A lot of the long-range planning issues and discussions that we have to deal with, with the county surrounding us, Strathcona County does not have those problems,” he said. “They can plan, and they do plan, their roads, their infrastructure regardless of the boundaries that exist around them.”
Sturgeon County Mayor Don Rigney said with the Capital Region Board already in place making intermunicipal planning decisions, he is unsure of the benefits.
Additionally, he said the area would lose votes at the board if six municipalities were to become one.
“We have six votes at the table,” he said. “All of a sudden we would be like Strathcona with 80,000 people and only one vote.”
Rigney also said his support would be entirely based on public support and deciding the issue would require a plebiscite.
St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse said the city is not interested in discussing the idea.
“I don’t have an opinion and I don’t want to create an opinion. It is something we are not going to spend any time on,” he said. “We have too many other priorities.”
The proposal has been studied before. In 2003 St. Albert Ald. Curtis Stewart asked city administrators for a report on the issue, but it was presented to city council in camera and the idea stalled.
Bertschi said most municipal leaders in the area he has talked to have not been excited about the idea.
“It has been very lukewarm, not ice cold, but pretty lukewarm,” he said. “It was probably on the cooler side of lukewarm.”
Bertschi said there is often a lot of concern about the loss of autonomy, but he doesn’t believe that would be a major concern.
He said smaller communities would still have their interests represented and anything that would be good for parts of the regional community would still go ahead.
“I believe that if it is good for that individual people inside of a larger community that they would do that anyway.”
He said it would certainly take a long time to work out the details, but he thinks it is worth exploring.
“Certainly in the Sturgeon area I don’t see a lot of downside to it.”
