Five years after a lengthy and costly annexation that soured relations between St. Albert and Sturgeon County, city council voted Monday night to start proceedings on its third annexation from the county in 11 years.
Five years after a lengthy and costly annexation that soured relations between St. Albert and Sturgeon County, city council voted Monday night to start proceedings on its third annexation from the county in 11 years.
On Monday evening council voted to designate 700 acres of land in the city’s west – land acquired from Sturgeon County in the last annexation – as future industrial land.
Many in the business community expected council to then withdraw administration’s recommendation that it begin annexation proceedings. Administration had floated the idea as an option if council did not approve of any of its other recommendations for the location of future industrial lands.
Instead, by a vote of five to two, council voted to begin an annexation of land from Sturgeon County. Coun. Malcolm Parker and Coun. Cam MacKay voted against the motion.
“Initiating it might mean a lot of things,” Mayor Nolan Crouse told council, expressing his support for the idea. “Walmart was an annexation. The next was a lot more contentious. Maybe there’s something here that’s a win-win.”
Sturgeon County Mayor Don Rigney did not return messages seeking comment.
While the Walmart annexation that took place in 2001 was a joint venture, conducted quickly to attract the mega-retailer to the area, the second annexation took six years to settle.
Even after the sides agreed to a plan – the intermunicipal development plan (IDP) – that spelled out how much land St. Albert would annex, where the lands would be located and when it would take place, the actual execution of it became divisive.
The matter was eventually referred to the province’s Municipal Government Board (MGB) to settle issues of revenue-sharing from taxes generated by commercial development along Highway 2, north of the city. The MGB ruled in favour of St. Albert, denying ongoing revenue-sharing to the county.
The county has since backed away from the IDP, in 2010, and chose last year not to renew a lucrative sponsorship opportunity at Servus Credit Union Place.
“I look at it as working in parallel,” said Crouse. “Both processes are several years in the making. You need to explore more options.”
Crouse said besides Sturgeon County, there are a couple of plots of land in Edmonton the city might want to examine.
Curtis Cundy, director of planning and development for St. Albert, said it was difficult to judge how long an annexation could take. He said negotiations consumed a great deal of the time spent on the second annexation, which the city could choose to limit this time around.
“We could probably reduce that to one to two years if we are willing to cut back on the negotiating time, if we’re not looking for anything consensual,” he said.
Coun. Cam MacKay voted against the motion, saying council might have gotten “lost in the moment.”
“We haven’t developed much, if any, of the lands we’ve currently annexed,” MacKay said. “We have to make an argument for it and we have to show a need and we have all this land right now, so it’s an uphill climb.”
The first step in an annexation will be submitting a business case for the 2013 budget, an item Monday night’s agenda report said could cost as much as $500,000.
