It’s been a year of hard work and new challenges for Foothills County.
Reeve Larry Spilak said the municipality takes everything in stride and works through issues as they arise.
“There are ongoing challenges, but we seem to be able to solve most of them and the ones that we don’t, we go back to the drawing board,” said Spilak.
One of the biggest problems in 2018 was completely out of the hands of the municipality, he said. A harsh winter followed by overland flooding in the spring left many Foothills roads damaged and in need of repair.
A long period of extreme heat in the summer followed immediately by six weeks of cool fall weather didn’t help matters, he said.
“It created a lot of challenges on our roads, a lot of repairs that needed to happen,” said Spilak.
Despite the weather, the County is still hopeful it will complete all the paving projects laid out for the year by the end of December, he said.
It wasn’t all bad in 2018, he said. The County managed to finalize its Flood Recovery Erosion Control (FREC) buyouts on 112 Street and 128 Street East and the Little Bow, he said.
“We’re currently completing the cleanup of these properties, being removing buildings, the foundations, capping the wells,” said Spilak.
Foothills has made strides in crime prevention and enforcement this year, he said.
An agreement was struck with the Town of High River and Foothills County now provides peace officer services for the Town, he said.
In addition, an enhanced policing pilot program with the RCMP launched in September, has helped the municipality tackle some of its ongoing rural crime issues, he said.
The County pays for an additional officer to patrol rural roads from the High River, Okotoks or Turner Valley detachments.
“What we have seen since we brought on these extra RCMP officers is less crime, less rural crime, and we’re hopeful that direction will continue,” said Spilak. “We do plan on bringing more officers on board as well to combat our rural crime issues.”
One of the bigger challenges faced by Foothills over the past couple of years has been adjusting to mandatory membership in the Calgary Metropolitan Board (CMB). Foothills is one of 10 municipalities in the Calgary region working on the regional planning framework the Province put into place in January 2018, he said.
To-date, the board has proposed an interim growth plan for the Province to consider and is now working on a full regional growth and servicing plan, which the government requires by January 2021, he said.
“It’s proved to be challenging in some respects,” said Spilak. “In other respects there is an amount of trust that is growing between the municipalities as well.”
He said the County looks forward to another year of negotiations in putting the plan together. It’s a different story than one year ago, when Foothills was concerned about how voting and vetoes were structured within the CMB.
“We have accepted the fact the governance is not going to change, but we are working on obtaining a third party appeal process so that we do have some protection of our land,” said Spilak.
If he had one wish for the CMB, he said it would be to develop a suitable long-range growth plan that would allow landowners in the MD to keep a degree of autonomy on their properties, he said.
“That would be my biggest wish, that we could have that,” said Spilak. “That would be the thing I would be most hopeful for next year.”
Planning for the immediate region is also
underway, he said. The Towns of Black Diamond and High River are working with the County on annexation agreements for future growth, and the City of Calgary has adopted a new intermunicipal development plan with the MD that stretches further south on the west side of Highway 2, he said.
It will be the next area for annexation by the City, and Spilak said despite there being some conversation around a portion of it happening in the near future, he can’t say when that may be or whether the entire area of land would be considered at once.
“We should know more about that in the next few months,” said Spilak.
Looking to the future, he said the focus is on attracting more industry to Foothills. The approval from Alberta Environment in 2018 for a water and wastewater treatment plant at Aldersyde will help with that initiative, he said.
“What that will do is give us an opportunity, along with Okotoks and High River through our collaboration, to develop our industrial corridor on the Highway 2A,” said Spilak.
“It’s very important to our future growth and ability to keep our residential taxes in line.”
