County OKs grant applications to help pay for collaborative agreement talks
A provincial requirement to set down new regional planning agreements will require talks between the three local governments in southeast Alberta, but also between Cypress County and the districts on its expansive borders.
On Tuesday, Cypress County supported grant applications totalling $200,000 to help pay for the process with the City of Medicine Hat and Redcliff.
As well, it will be part of a second $200,000 grant request to fund planning activities with County of Newell and Special Areas.
Changes to the Municipal Government Act will require that by April 2020, neighbouring jurisdictions have a new set of agreements to govern their relationships.
They are an inter-municipal development plan (IDP) to coordinate growth and development on common borders, and also intermunicipal collaboration frameworks (ICF) to discuss common service delivery and possible cost savings.
County CAO Doug Henderson said Tuesday the grants, applied for under the province’s Community Partnership program, will defray staffing costs or go to hire consultants needed to write the agreements.
“We need (separate) IDP and ICF with the County of Newell and with Special Areas, and Newell needs those with Special areas,” said Henderson.
“They would look almost identical and one, when completed, would be a template for the others."
The county’s rural planning grant request will be administered by the County of Newell, while the urban request will be administered by the City of Medicine Hat.
City council here also approved its grant request this week.
Redcliff, Medicine Hat and Cypress County have already had an IDP in place since 2010, but it is due this year for a regularly scheduled update.
Discussions and negotiations on collaboration could touch on any off-site levy to pay development costs, tax sharing or combining service delivery and administration.
Cypress County will submit defaulted property tax bills totalling $128,000 to a provincial government program that refunds a portion of unpaid education taxes owed by bankrupt oil and gas companies.
That covers accounts more than two-years in arrears, with finance officials saying three times that amount is still on the books to be dealt with in coming years.
The Provincial Education Requisition Credit is a $10-million program set up by the province to help rural jurisdictions when oilpatch companies failed to pay taxes during the recent downturn.
On Tuesday county councillors voted to cancel eight accounts that are overdue two years so that administrators can apply for about $10,000 in relief for the 2015 and 2016 tax years.
Briefing notes state however, that a further $419,000 in tax is past due and related to companies that are now in or are entering receivership. That amount, including $247,000 for 2017, could be submitted over the next two years.
This year, council cancelled tax accounts now considered uncollectable totalling $37,605 on eight accounts related to seven companies.
Administrators also went through previous years’ tax cancellations and found four accounts that now qualify for partial repayment.
Those are all related to Petro Viking Management Corp, and total $81,900, with the education portion being $24,600.
The total recovery from the provincial program would be about $10,000.