'I'm completely disappointed': St. Albert mayor speaks on photo radar, election changes and provincial relationship

Cathy Heron, mayor of St. Albert, discusses the impact of the provincial government’s decision to reduce photo radar in the province, the defunding of regional planning boards and more with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Mixed reaction from St. Albert residents to the Smith government's announcement of a significant cut to the number of photo radar sites in the province.

It’s a development that has resulted in the city's photo radar contractor reducing services to reassess its business model. Joining us now to discuss that and more is the mayor of St. Albert, Cathy Heron.

Mayor Heron, let’s start right there on follow-up from the government's photo radar announcement – was hitting a roadblock with your city service provider on your bingo card? Were you expecting that?

Cathy Heron: Quite honestly, I feel quite bad for the service providers and the contractors. They have a business and they have employees, and they've been hit just as hard as the municipalities with this announcement.

I think it's going to be quite clear by the end of this interview, I'm completely disappointed. I'm a fan of the tool to help enforce speed on our roads.

MH: So what do you foresee the impact of this reduction being?

CH: You can talk about the dollar value - and people then claim that we're using it for revenue generation. We're not. It's a fine. It's a fine for a crime. We hand out fines for parking tickets. We hand out fines for a lot of things.

Most bylaws and laws need to have some sort of enforcement, and quite often that's a monetary enforcement. So yes, there'll be a financial impact to the city's budget.

We'll make a decision whether we would like to supplement that loss through taxes - which could happen - or we will lose safety on our streets. We use the money on traffic calming measures. Those are like the flashing crosswalks and the ball bumps to keep people going slow.

Without those measures, we'll have issues of speeding on our streets, 100 per cent.

MH: Do you then reassess how you police the community? Because safety is an issue here, do you put the RCMP more in that capacity?

CH: We talked to RCMP already about this. We have a traffic division within our RCMP.

I will 100 per cent agree with most people's opinion that that's the best deterrent - to get pulled over by an RCMP officer and get a ticket immediately, get the demerits. That also opens up opportunities for the RCMP to investigate maybe other suspicious activities within the vehicle. One-hundred per cent that's the best. That's also expensive.

RCMP officers might pull over two or three people an hour, and so the fines generated from that will not cover the RCMP officer. So again, would we like to bring in more RCMP officers and raise taxes, but have our streets safer? We'll see where that goes.

We also have bylaw that can do it as well, but you won't catch the number of speeders as photo radar. We do set up in areas that have high frequency of speeders, because that's where they're speeding - it's just simple math. We have to justify to the province already where we put those locations, and they're based on complaints from the public and data.

We know that that's where the speeders are and we need to slow them down, so we put the deterrent right there.

MH: A decision of another sort appears to have caught multiple municipalities off guard. That being the Smith government pulling funding for regional planning boards. What's your read on the rationale? What's the impact of that?

CH: It's going to be huge. And I don't think the public is really kind of aware of this decision.

The funding is one - we need the money. They mandated us to sit together, they should help pay for it - but the fact that they're making these boards voluntary is going to be the bigger impact in my opinion.

There's lots of studies to say that regional collaboration is positive and we need to be sitting at the same table. In the Edmonton region, there's 13 of us. What a great opportunity to be collaborative and to avoid duplication and to work together, because criminals don't see the boundaries, air pollution doesn't see the boundaries, etc. So it's going to change the nature of the way these mayors sit around the table.

When you have to sit there, you are forced to work out your differences. You learn from each other, you understand your rural-urban divide differences, and we come out with a better outcome. If it's voluntary, you'll see people standing up from the table and walking away.

MH: Speaking of sitting at the table, you hosted the fall meeting of the Mid-Sized Cities Mayors Caucus. What made that a productive conversation? How aligned are you as municipalities?

CH: Some people might remember me in my role as president of Alberta Municipalities - which represents anyone from a village to the city of Edmonton and Calgary. But the mid-size is really a collection of 24 mayors, all urban, but not the big cities. We have so much in common. We all have urban issues such as housing problems, transit, social problems like homelessness, etc.

It's an opportunity for us to get together and it’s so productive. We really get a lot of work done in the short amount of time we spend together. And the province is listening to us.

We represent over 20 MLAs that are UCP MLAs that are urban. Quite often people think of the caucus in legislature right now as all the MLAs are rural, but that's not true. The mid cities are mostly UCP and mostly urban.

The premier showed up, municipal affairs minister Rick McIver came and we had great conversations with them - one of them being about photo radar, about what we could do to help them achieve their goals. It's a very good group of people and we get a lot done.

MH: As you've mentioned, you were past president of Alberta Municipalities.

You've had a bit of time now away from that role - I have to think you experienced a lot in terms of the relationship with the provincial government.

So now that you've stepped away, how do you look upon that relationship between municipalities and the province?

CH: I don't think it's at all improved. If anything it has gotten a little worse.

The new president, Tyler Gandam, is taking a different approach to the relationship - which I actually applaud him for. He's taking a bit of a more targeted and adversarial approach.

This last year, I've been very grateful I was not at the helm of that association because of the frustrations and the lack of consultation and the lack of listening.

The photo radar is a perfect example of them not hearing what municipalities are asking for. The voting tabulators is a perfect example. So the relationship is very strained I would say.

MH: You mentioned vote tabulators. Your city had four resolutions at the Fall convention for Alberta Municipalities urging the government to pull back on that decision. Why bring that one forward?

CH: I think what we're seeing is a trend in Alberta with the Municipal Affairs Minister and the government and how they treat municipalities as it's political instead of data driven.

The voting tabulators - there's no evidence that those tabulators are ineffective. In fact, there's a ton of evidence to say they're very accurate. But they made a decision based on no public input and no evidence. We were upset in St. Albert and across province, so St. Albert put the resolution in.

It's going to cost us almost a million dollars more to run the election in October. And I have a feeling my residents are going to not trust the results, because they were hand counted. So we're going to be hand counting, and that introduces human error. Human error can introduce bias into a vote and it's going to be difficult.

McIver said the exact opposite - he said it's going to introduce more confidence. I'm 100 per cent sure it's going to be less confident.