September is upon us and it is always one of the busiest months of the year for council. I hope you all had a great summer and had opportunity to take in our Labour Day Weekend festivities before getting back to the routines of kids back to school and such.
A huge thank you and congratulations needs to go out to our Cochrane Lions Club for another amazing rodeo weekend celebrating their 50th year. Between a fighter jet doing a fly by to start off the rodeo, and fireworks lighting up the arena at night it was a first class rodeo full of activities for the whole family. To all the Lions members: Thank you for all your efforts and your ongoing support of this community!
As well, a big thank you to the Cochrane Area Events Society for organizing our Labour Day Parade. Always an event to look forward to and another example of fantastic community spirit as we had huge crowds all along the route.
For an update on some town business, conversations on “road dedication” with the development community on the south side of the river (for our future James Walker Trail connection to the bridge) have been going very well. I am confident we will have an agreement in place very soon that will lay out the road connections through South Bow Landing and the gravel operation. With this alignment agreed to in principle, we can then work on the details that will see connection of James Walker Trail to the new bridge, to be built near the Spray Lake Sawmills Family Sports Centre, which will then connect to Griffin Road. All parties involved want the same thing: a second river crossing to provide better connectivity for communities on both sides of the river. This Council made this crossing a priority and we will see that it happens!
On the question of “freezing development.” If you have been following the papers over the summer you will know that I am not in agreement with that notion. I do very much appreciate that we have issues with traffic — literally all communities do. Council has been doing what we can to address this issue and these efforts will continue. Aside from the bridge and road works I talked about above, we have seen an improvement of traffic flow on Fifth Avenue as a result of the completion of Centre Avenue through the Quarry shopping area, and this will improve again when we open Grande Boulevard later this fall. The biggest effort is still our ongoing push to have the province advance our 1A and 22 intersections for next year’s provincial budget. With all this work ongoing, the idea of freezing development, in my opinion, would negatively affect all of the work to date. I believe it would send the wrong message to the province, to the business community and to the developers we are trying to work with.
We need to continue to support and strengthen our business community and balance that with sustainable growth that we all count on.
