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Provincial budget grant meets county's expectations

Rocky View County staff is satisfied with the amount of money it is receiving from the province in 2013.
Rocky View County
Rocky View County

Rocky View County staff is satisfied with the amount of money it is receiving from the province in 2013.

Kent Robinson, general manager of corporate services, said the county received a letter from municipal affairs saying the municipality would receive $12 million in capital and operating funds from the province’s Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) grant program. The letter was sent after the Alberta 2013 Budget announcement, March 7.

About $850,000 of the grant will go towards operations, with the remainder going to capital projects, added Robinson.

“We had kind of expected this,” said Robinson.

“We were conservative in our assessments.”

Reeve Rolly Ashdown agreed.

“I don’t think (MSI funding) has changed much,” he said. “I don’t think there is any impact to the county.”

Robinson said the MSI program is the county’s main source of grants, although the municipality will receive an additional $750,000 from the province’s Rural Transportation Grant, the same as last year’s funding announcement.

Rocky View released its base budget in December. The draft capital budget included about $34 million in projects such as the Balzac fire station, Bragg Creek water and wastewater treatment plants and water infrastructure in Conrich.

Council is expected to approve the 2013 budget at the end of April with a three per cent increase in the county’s portion and an anticipated four per cent increase in the school requisition portion (controlled by the province), according to Ashdown.

Robinson said when the MSI program was announced several years ago, the province had forecasted it would be giving out $1.4 billion to Alberta municipalities this year, with the county’s share coming in at $19 million.

In the 2012 Alberta budget, the province said it would be providing $1 billion to municipalities this year in MSI funding, instead, the number came in at around $846 million. Next year’s projections are for the same amount.

Robinson said Rocky View was not surprised that the numbers remained the same as last year.

“We have allocated our MSI over multiple years, (because) we had expected that potentially full funding wouldn’t be there again,” he said.

Robinson said staff and council had planned accordingly before the budget was announced, March 7.

“There was lots of rumour prior to the budget being released, so we were under the impression that anything was on the table,” he said.

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