St. Albert mayor fears federal dollars could be left on the table

St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron speaks with Alberta Primetime Host Michael Higgins about her city's need to access federal funding to keep up with the rapid population growth.

Michael Higgins: Let's start on the issue of access to infrastructure dollars. You've generated some headlines for being frustrated over Alberta’s involvement in a 10-year funding agreement with the federal government. What's at play?

Cathy Heron: Well municipalities really, honestly, rely on funding from both the provincial and the federal level of government and the last sitting of the legislature seemed to put some of those grants at risk. You said at the top that we feel, municipalities feel, that we're caught in the middle of an unspoken difference between the federal and provincial government. So there is a grant that the federal government provides called the Canadian Building Fund, used to be called the gas tax, and we quite liked that grant because it is indexed. So it increases in size every year, it is predictable, and we have a fairly broad scope of stuff we can spend that money on and generally municipalities spend it on really needed infrastructure, roads and bridges and fire halls, etc. And for some reason that is unknown to myself, there seems to be a hitch in the negotiations on the next tenure agreement between the federal government and provincial government.

Michael Higgins: OK, so how needed is that renegotiation of the tenure agreement? How needed is it for the province to step in and help out municipalities?

Cathy Heron: We’re not going to get the money until the agreement is signed. So that's the first thing and for a municipality the size of St. Albert that is about, over $4 million for us. You know $4 million, if I had to get that out of my tax base would be about a 4 per cent tax increase. So it's super important and so St. Albert has some reserves that we can rely on until the federal government and the provincial government work this out and so we'll dip into our reserves and maybe replenish them later on this year if the negotiations go quickly. If they don't go quickly then projects such as roads, bridges and fire halls and whatever the municipality’s planning will have to get delayed and then we're going into a deeper infrastructure debt deficit. And we've talked about that in the past, the $30 billion deficit that municipalities are facing in infrastructure.

Michael Higgins: How does this play in the wake of the spring sitting and a contentious bill like Bill 18?

Cathy Heron: OK, so Bill 18 was the bill that requires municipalities to get approval from the province before we accept any money from the federal government and I don't think that was really referring to the gas tax, that Canadian Building Fund Grant but there's other grants that are sometimes one offs. Transit would be good example, housing would be another one, that the federal government sees a need and tries to structure a grant around and if I have to go to the province every time I need to access some of this money, it's my fear, and I think it's a valid fear, that money will be left on the table that Alberta will be losing out on federal infrastructure grants. And when the premier is talking about getting a greater share of federal dollars, I don't know how she thinks Bill 18 is going to achieve that.

Michael Higgins: On the issue of infrastructure, what's your takeaway from Calgary’s struggles with the massive feeder main rupture? How has that changed discussions maybe around your council table?

Cathy Heron: Well, Calgary's water issue, it's a utility, it's slightly different. A big city such as Calgary and Edmonton and St. Albert, for that matter, funds our utilities out of utility rates. It's a commodity that you pay for. So for example, St. Albert had to build a new water reservoir just this last year and it was $20 million plus but we had saved that money up through rates. But of course it just highlights, I would say, an issue we're having in all of Alberta, that the water mains, sewer mains, especially in the smaller municipalities where they really rely on federal grants to cover that off, because utility rates just can't cover it, we're crumbling. And you'll see it when we need more schools in Alberta, we definitely need more rec centers in Alberta, we need more ambulances on the road. There's so many things that we need to invest in that aren't being done and I don't know how we're going to cope with the attraction level that we're bringing into Alberta, which we applaud but we need to be able to provide a quality of life for those people that are moving here.

Michael Higgins: OK, maybe playing off that point a bit, housing is of course an issue front and centre for many municipalities. Your council recently committed nearly $2.9 million toward a downtown affordable housing project. A move you've been quoted as calling "ballsy and bold." What makes it so?

Cathy Heron: Well, it's not just the $2.9 million mentioned that we just approved, we also gave the land to this development so that was another $3 million. So we're trying to show our commitment to housing in St. Albert through municipal investment and when I said ballsy and bold, I meant it because not many municipalities do step up to the level that St. Albert has. So we're looking to fund 12 per cent of this project. So we did that to get the eye of the province and say, 'We’re committed to this, we hope that you are too because we are really going to require provincial help with this project.' But I actually think we'll get it and it's going to be great for St. Albert. St. Albert has a really low vacancy rate for rentals, well below the provincial average, and we need to invest in that so I was pretty proud of my council for making that decision.

Michael Higgins: OK and your city is now sifting through data from the recently completed municipal census. I believe it's the first in six years. What do you expect those results to say about the pace of growth and where St. Albert is heading, especially compared to other municipalities?

Cathy Heron: Well, I would say that there's a group of us in Alberta that call ourselves the midsized cities. So you know, the Red Deers, Lethbridges, Grande Prairies, Airdries, St. Alberts of the world. We’re growing quite quickly, maybe faster than Edmonton and Calgary, because of affordability. But we still have access to a lot of the amenities that people need, whether it's hospitals or transit or recreation. So we're growing very fast. I'm guessing St. Albert, we actually have a little poll around my council table, will be 73,000+ which would be a big increase in the per cent that we have grown. We traditionally grow at about 1.4 per cent. It's predictable, it's slow and steady, it's manageable. I love it but at the same time St. Albert is bringing on more development. We've got more rentals, we've got more high density. So with that brings more people in at a faster growth and that faster growth will require infrastructure investment and so population is a factor that is used when calculating how much money a municipality will get in grants.