CAPITAL REGION MUST MOVE WITH CONCERTED EFFORT
Metro Edmonton’s future demands adult leadership, and it needs it now
Don Lowry has a certain way with metaphors.
“The big horse, energy, is not going to carry us all the way,” says the former CEO of Epcor, and current chairman of the Edmonton Metro Advisory Panel.
Translation? We have to diversify our regional economy because we can’t count on the energy sector to do all the work for us.
“We can’t just hunker down in our municipalities and milk the cows that we have.”
Translation? Cities and counties can’t just go on relying on their own local tax bases.
“You can’t have 24 quarterbacks all calling different plays in huddle. At least shave it down to nine quarterbacks.”
Translation? The 24-member Capital Region Board, created, somewhat forcibly, by thenpremier Ed Stelmach back in 2008, isn’t nimble enough to give metro Edmonton the leadership it needs.
On Friday, Lowry and his panel released a scathing report about this region’s future. The report was commissioned last fall at a cost of $600,000 by a new group called the Metro Mayors Alliance. It represents nine municipalities with 95 per cent of the regional population, and 96 per cent of the regional tax assessment base: Edmonton, Strathcona County, St. Albert, Sturgeon County, Fort Saskatchewan, the City of Leduc, Leduc County, Spruce Grove and Parkland County.
“If municipalities don’t change their current trajectory,” the report warns, “as much as 87,700 additional hectares of agricultural land and 50,200 hectares of natural areas could be lost to unco-ordinated development over the next 50 years.”
That would double the size of metro Edmonton’s already huge footprint. The upshot?
“Taxpayers could be on the hook for an additional $8.2 billion to service that larger footprint with roads and other public infrastructure.”
The report offers just three recommendations — a novelty since many such documents often bog down with dozens. And its recommendations are charmingly simple. They don’t require amalgamation or super councils, just political will.
The first recommendation is to market, promote and develop this as one integrated economic region.
The second is to create a regional transit system, connecting cities along major routes.
The third is to come with a joint land-use plan to encourage density and complementary zoning.
It’s all sane, solid and sensible, although it’s hard to see why, exactly, we needed to pay almost $200,000 per recommendation except to give the nine mayors the necessary political coverage and justification. And these are hardly new ideas. They’ve been repeated in previous reports and studies.
Still, it would be worth every penny of $600,000 — Lowry says the report actually cost slightly less — if it worked. Based on past practices, though, that’s certainly not guaranteed.
Right now, the panel recommends the nine mayors sign a “non-binding ” memorandum of understanding by this fall and a legal “master agreement” by next autumn. Politically, that’s tricky timing, since autumn of 2017 is also when municipal elections will take place across Alberta. It’s easy to see the master agreement turning into an explosive election issue through the region.
It’s fair to worry, too, that setting up a parallel process and system to duplicate the work the Capital Region Board — or at least, the work that the board is supposed to be doing — might create new layers of political complication.
And yet, this is a critical moment.
The Alberta government is bringing in a new Municipal Government Act. There are major federal transportation infrastructure dollars in the offing if we can make a competitive bid for funding. And with oil prices languishing, we can no longer afford to coast, the way we did when WTI was at US$100 a barrel.
If we want to make the best, most efficient, most ecologically responsible use of our land base, we have to plan together.
If we want to market our region to investors, to immigrants, to tourists, we need to join forces to get our message heard.
If we want to lobby the provincial and federal governments for infrastructure dollars, we can’t be competing among ourselves.
So many reports on this very topic have done little but gather dust. Why should this one be any different?
Lowry acknowledges the challenge. But he says the answer is leadership, from mayors who can look past their local loyalties for the long-term betterment of the region.
“We need a real adult conversation,” he says.
Metro Edmonton politicians? Behaving like adults? Perhaps that’s the craziest metaphor of them all.
But then again, these nine mayors commissioned this report. Now we’ll have to see if they have the leadership and the political will to use it.
For decades now, the notion of meaningful collaboration among the municipalities that make up the metro Edmonton region has been a siren’s song. The theory of regional co-operation sounds oh-so sweet and alluring, drawing local leaders in to an assortment of regional organizations, until the politicians get up close and consider the ugly political consequences of tying their futures too tightly together.
A report last week from the Advisory Panel on Metro Edmonton’s Future — commissioned by the nine communities that make up the 95 per cent of the Edmonton area’s population including Edmonton, Strathcona County, St. Albert and Leduc — says there is a way forward on regional co-operation that should be nothing but beautiful music.
The alternative — doing nothing and maintaining the status quo, they said in the report called Be Ready, or Be Left Behind — is far more damaging to the region’s future as it looks to compete globally. The key, according to the panel headed by former Epcor boss Don Lowry, is to focus in on three areas: economic development, public transit and land use planning in areas of regional significance.
In that respect, this report’s narrow focus is a refreshing change from many previous studies on regional co-operation that came with enough recommendations to paper the highway between Fort Saskatchewan and Spruce Grove. And it seems like such common sense. Why don’t the region’s cities collaborate more on mass transit corridors and share transit services? Why do so many individual cities and towns have their own economic development branches when the region would be better served by a one-stop shop? The challenges of collaborating on land use is easier to understand. No community wants to be told by another what to do with its backyard, and yet the Edmonton area is interlocked like a puzzle. One piece ultimately blends into the other and there has to be a logic to that development, which is why the provincial government created the Capital Region Board in 2008 to draw up a growth plan.
The panel is calling on the region’s leaders not to dawdle. They’ve called for a memorandum of understanding between the nine cities to collaborate on these three areas to be signed by the fall and for a master agreement that spells out the details to be approved by March 2017.
That’s a tight time frame and means action in a municipal election year, but the nine municipalities that commissioned this report ought to take its advice seriously. It would be a shame, and so short-sighted, for this report to be just another regional exercise that collects dust on a shelf.