A group of Okotoks residents with questions over a proposed community campus was told to hold on and wait on Nov. 12.
The Okotoks Ratepayers Community Group brought forward concerns with a 70,000 square-foot facility on Riverside Drive that would include an expansion to bring the library up to 25,000 square feet, as well as space for Christ the Redeemer Catholic Schools, Foothills School Division, Community Futures and Bow Valley College.
It comes at a cost of $23.3 million, a budget item approved by Okotoks council at its May 27 meeting.
Most of the group’s concern rose after members attended an information session about the proposed campus on Oct. 3.
“We found the information session was very high-level with no specific details and no mechanism to provide any feedback and participation,” said spokesperson Ryan Nix at the Nov. 12 council meeting.
He said the Ratepayers group is not opposed to a new library or arts campus, but wants to know the business case for the facility, its financial and social benefits for the community, how parking will be handled, and why the location at the current Okotoks Public Library and Ethel Tucker Park was chosen.
Beyond being in the flood hazard zone, Nix said building a community facility on finite land between a river and railway tracks limits its future potential.
“It doesn’t allow the facility to grow,” he said. “We’ve seen in the MDP (municipal development plan) the Town is planning for a population in the next 60 years of 60 to 80,000 people, so how does this campus grow in a confined location to serve that?”
He said the information session didn’t provide many details about the project or how the community partners intend to work together on its construction.
“From our point of view, we don’t know what that mix looks like, we don’t know how many tax dollars or how much partner contributions or how much donations are going into the project,” said Nix in an interview. “We really don’t know what it’s costing the ratepayers.”
In its open letter to council stating concerns and questions over the project, the Okotoks Ratepayers group stated the project would cost about $2,400 per household or $800 per capita.
Coun. Tanya Thorn said that’s not the case.
“It really is actually by rough numbers around $200 per capita, so those are two very significantly different numbers,” said Thorn in the meeting.
The letter had also suggested the project was only to expand the current library, but the space is designed to be shared by community partners, she said.
Having an arts and learning campus on the library site will help remove some non-taxable entities from downtown, freeing up space on the town’s main street to bring in more businesses, she said.
“It is bringing five partners together that have great synergies, it’s freeing up some taxable land that we aren’t collecting taxes on in our downtown core, creating an anchor for our downtown core, and allowing all of them to expand and create growth,” said Thorn.
She said if each of the five groups was to construct a building similar in size to the square footage alotted in the community campus facility, the land footprint would be double.
Thorn said the questions coming forward from the Ratepayers are appreciated, but the group needs to be more careful in how it presents its information as far as the project’s purpose and costs.
“We need to be putting facts out to the community that are actually factual and not inflaming it,” she said. “I’m happy to receive the questions and I think all of us are happy to receive that, but to put it out to the community that this is the basis of fact, I have huge concerns about that piece.”
Coun. Florence Christophers said while she understood where the group’s questions came from, they were just a little early in bringing them up in council.
There are still validation meetings occurring between the five partnering bodies to ensure the proposed facility meets budgets and achieves the goals of each group.
“It’s just coming to light now,” said Christophers. “The next couple of council meetings you’ll have more information coming forward, but it’s a very unique process how this project has unfolded.”
Nix said the information session should have been held off until the Town had more answers on the table. It could have avoided the letter being written in the first place, he said.
Being told to wait for answers that are forthcoming doesn’t give him much confidence in the process.
“It doesn’t seem very transparent to me that we’re supposed to wait until the end of November or into December to get project details for something that’s starting up in March,” said Nix. “That doesn’t really give ratepayers very much time to react or look at the details.”
He said the intent of the letter and presentation was not to be inflammatory, but to get more details about the project into the public eye.
“If all these questions are being addressed in the background, and we hope they are, that’s fantastic. But we want to know that,” said Nix.
