The addition of a new double-wide trailer for Turner Valley municipal staff will provide much-needed relief to its existing tight quarters this fall.
The Town of Turner Valley is allocating $415,000 of the more than $1 million approved through the Southern Alberta Flood Recovery Grant to lease a 2,880 square-foot ATCO trailer to alleviate crowding in its municipal office. Two years ago the Town hired five additional employees for flood-related tasks and covered by grant funding.
The trailer will be equipped with offices and washrooms and will be placed north of the municipal office.
“That current building that we have is so very small,” said Turner Valley Mayor Kelly Tuck. “We’ve crammed everybody in there. When you’re trying to have a conversation or someone is at the front counter and you have people on the phone it’s really hard to stay focused and stay on task because there are several conversations going on at one time.”
Barry Williamson, the Town’s chief administrative officer, said having 16 employees working in the approximately 6,000 square-foot municipal office is unproductive.
“The offices are tight, even the traffic from one floor to the next is tight,” he said. “We’ve had to arrange meetings in our kitchen. That’s not appropriate or sustainable.”
An ATCO trailer the Town purchased in 2014 for its council chambers, located just north of the municipal office, has becoming a meeting place for numerous town discussions over the last two years, Williamson said.
“We use the council chambers more than we should be in terms of meeting and it creates conflict with what council is trying to do,” he said. “We just don’t have the space for meetings with the administration and a lot of the contractors and engineers.”
The Town will have to foot the bill to hook up gas, power, water and sewer, Williamson said.
Turner Valley Town council approved $85,000 for the servicing during a council meeting last spring. The money will come from the Town’s reserve funds.
Once flood-related work is complete and the employees will no longer be needed, expected to be in early 2016, Williamson said the Town could still have use for the trailer.
“When we finally get out of that recovery mode we’ve already started to grow based on the growth of the town and services,” he said. “That space would be very much needed. We will look at it when the lease is finished as to how do we keep it.”
Andy Pfeifer, director of engineering and municipal operations, said the trailer should be in place before the snow flies and that the space will likely be used mostly for planning purposes.
“It’s just a reorganizational shuffle of existing staff in the building from here out to there,” he said. “What we desperately needed was the meeting room and mapping room component in this one. We’ve got maps in the corner, drawings and things we want to get in proper order.”
