Last week, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs kicked off a 20-stop tour across Alberta to consult with the public and municipal leaders on Bill 21, the recently updated and tabled Municipal Government Act.
The third of the open house sessions took place at the Athabasca Regional Multiplex on June 3.
With Fort McMurray evacuees beginning to return to the smoky city the same week, Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee was unable to attend the session, so Athabasca-Sturgeon-Redwater MLA Colin Piquette spoke in her place.
“The reception seems generally positive,” Piquette said. “The people, they have some questions and clarification. It’s a very long bill, so that’s not surprising.”
In fact, it is the second largest piece of legislation the province has, following only the Insurance Act.
“They do have some concerns around some particular issues, some of them around capacity for smaller municipalities to kind of meet these timelines and stuff, and that’s something that we’re working with,” Piquette said.
In addition to town hall-style presentations and question-and-answer sessions, the province organized booths for people to talk about the changes.
Bill 21 follows up on legislation introduced last spring, the Municipal Government Amendment Act. Once the kinks have been worked out, the province plans to proclaim the entire MGA before October 2017, the next municipal elections.
Coun. Nichole Adams, also a director for the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA), said she was pleased to see the province taking a lead on mandatory inter-municipal revenue and cost sharing agreements, by legislating the creation new inter-municipal collaborative framework agreements between neighbouring municipalities.
She and others with AUMA were, however, not satisfied with the modernized Act’s lack of sustainable financial support for communities.
“There is still no commitment from the province for sustainable infrastructure funding,” she said. “How are we supposed to talk about money when we don’t know from year to year how much money will actually be there?”
Coun. Steven Schafer said that he believes the province is “on the right road for most” of the amendments made in the MGA.
Schafer said his biggest concerns relate to the longevity of the Act, noting that he believed some of the changes came as a result of the province being in an economic downturn.
Another change caught his attention – Bill 21 states municipalities have to offer orientation training to elected municipal representatives, but officials are not mandated to attend unless it is specifically written into the municipality’s bylaws.
“I thought that’s a bit of an oxymoron,” Schafer said.
Doris Splane, reeve for Athabasca County, was not serving in the area when changes were last made to the Act in 1995, but she remembers the impacts the changes had when she entered local politics in 2001.
“There will be a lot of fallout, and it will take a number of years for the public to learn about, basically,” she said.
She also said she was optimistic about the changes in the act.
“The Act needed to be reviewed and this is the fallout,” she said. “There’s certainly a lot of change, we’re living in a different world than we did in ’95.”
The Village of Boyle’s chief administrative officer Charlie Ashbey said he thought the steps to change to the MGA were in the right direction.
However, he hoped that the new mandated inter-municipal collaboration frameworks would not spell a misstep for the complicated web of agreements already established or being developed between rural communities.
Like Adams, he said he had hoped to see the MGA establish a steadier revenue source for municipalities.
“It would be nice if the MGA could mandate some kind of certainty with some grant programs,” he said.
