St. Albert city council approved the city’s participation in an international conference in Spain later this year, but stopped short of using contingency funds to send two members of council.
The proposal was to send a few city staff and council members to Barcelona, Spain, in November for a conference focused on smart city technology.
The report, given to council by the economic development department’s executive director Guy Boston, suggested the goals were twofold: attracting foreign investors to St. Albert as well as researching best practices when it comes to smart city development.
Smart city refers to the use of technology by municipal governments to benefit residents, such as making data openly available, using programs to ease traffic or having mobile phone applications like NextBus.
St. Albert is the founding municipal member of the Alberta Smart City Alliance. Other founding members include NAIT, the University of Alberta, IBM and Cisco Canada.
The projected funding for the trip was to spend $22,000 from the economic development department’s business attraction budget and $15,000 through council’s contingency reserve to fund two members of council attending.
Staff is also looking at using grants to pay to have a booth and other promotional materials at the conference.
The proposal sparked a debate at council about the worth of travelling that far afield, with Coun. Cam MacKay questioning whether the benefits for St. Albert outweigh the costs.
MacKay proposed sending a delegation to an upcoming smart city conference in Montreal next month, instead – an idea that was rejected by the majority of council in a 5-2 vote.
MacKay said the idea of going and presenting at an international smart city conference and portraying St. Albert as a leader in the field seemed “ostentatious” and “ridiculous” to him.
Going to Montreal was preferable because it’s cheaper, closer to home and there’d be less of a language barrier, MacKay said, though city manager Patrick Draper noted that at international conferences there tends to be translator services available – and that French is the official language in Quebec.
The notion of going to Montreal instead was panned by staff and some of the other councillors. Some of the speakers at the Montreal conference are similar to ones they’ve seen before, they said.
However, the motion to send a small team of city staff to Barcelona was only narrowly passed in a 4-3 vote.
Coun. Tim Osborne voted against the motion to go. He said he was supportive of the smart city alliance, but thought St. Albert could derive benefit from the fact that its partners IBM and Cisco would attend Barcelona and could share their information.
Coun. Wes Brodhead said in his experience going to international conferences helps increase exposure.
He also suggested that St. Albert could derive benefit by looking at the smart city concept from a different perspective.
“If you want to pursue excellence, you have to pursue it where you can find it,” he said.
While council was prepared to spend money already in the economic development department’s budget to send staff, it wasn’t ready to make a withdrawal from the council contingency fund to send elected officials. Councillors could still opt to go using their own professional development budgets.
