Give me land, lots of land: Annexations in Alberta and why you should care
Reporter Juris Graney chatted with urban planning expert Sandeep Agrawal, director of the University of Alberta’s new School of Urban and Regional Planning, about the importance of land annexations and municipal boundary adjustments and why you should care about them.
Q What are the options when it comes to municipal boundary adjustments?
A Essentially there are five main options — the first is that you can form a completely new municipality. Another way is when a municipality is completely absorbed into another like the village of Thorhild in 2009. The third way is a change of status, so basically what happened with Strathcona County or the RM of Wood Buffalo where rural and urban municipalities were merged together to form a specialized municipality. Then there is amalgamation like what happened in Cold Lake in 1996. Then there is annexation. It’s basically another form of shifting boundaries and essentially what it does is permanently acquire and incorporate territory of an adjacent non-contiguous municipality.
Q What’s the process like?
A A municipality must give written notice to its neighbours and Alberta legislation requires that negotiations must be held between the initiating municipality and the municipal authority from which the land is to be annexed. Then a report on the negotiation must be submitted to the Municipal Government Board that deliberates on the matter and recommends a decision for the provincial government.
Q Why choose land annexation as the preferred option?
A Across Canada historically land annexation was the way to go. Go back to the ’50s and ’60s in Ontario, B.C., the Maritimes, and it was all annexation. Then over the years changes to municipal governance meant that it moved from annexation to amalgamation, mostly provinces telling municipalities they need to amalgamate. They didn’t have much choice. In Alberta it’s predominately been annexation. The three main reasons that stand out is that municipalities want to expand and diversify their revenues. The idea here is that they annex the land so they can turn it into non-residential uses like commercial and industrial which are taxed at a much higher rate. The second reason is to prepare for any large scale residential development because of increased population, like Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton. The third reason is to have enough land for future growth.
Q How common is it?
A Between 2001 and 2016, Saskatchewan has led all provinces in the number of annexations (283) followed by B.C. (212) and Alberta (210). Between 2006 and 2010, almost 25 per cent of Alberta municipalities underwent annexations, which led the country. The next closest was British Columbia with 14 per cent. Since 1995 there have been more than 300 annexations in Alberta with about 10 to 20 per cent contested. There’s a much more streamlined process for annexation in Saskatchewan through the Municipal Boundary Committee, hence the numbers. It handles all the processes and applications and it is bound to make a decision within four months. That’s not the case in Alberta.
Q Why should people care about annexation?
A We are still figuring out if annexation is a positive net benefit to either of the municipalities. But when a municipality annexes land it has to be serviced with things like roads and power and that has implications on property taxes because if it has to be serviced, money has to come from somewhere and the existing taxpayers will have to foot the bill. Theoretically there could be a drain on revenues and a strain on expenses. Another problem is that some land owners may not want to be annexed and that brings up uncertainty about the future of the land.