Rocky View County (RVC) council approved the first reading of a new Off-Site Levy Bylaw during the Dec. 11 that will allow the County to better fund future new recreation and fire services infrastructure.
Although the bylaw is only in its first reading, it’s becoming clear how the County plans to fund five new fire halls and five new recreation facilities.
However, Jeanette Lee, the manager for Capital and Engineering Services for RVC, said council, as always, can still amend the bylaw as they see fit before it goes to second and third reading.
“[The County] still has the ability to bring this back,” said Lee.
The council report on the proposed bylaw states that as the County’s development proceeds and the levy funds are collected, future servicing needs are refined and prioritized, and as capital funding plans are developed, it is expected the County will be required to review and update the levy rates as appropriate on a regular basis.
The future capital cost for the five proposed fire stations in Madden, Bragg Creek, Conrich, Harmony, and Cochrane Lake is estimated at $39 million. The five recreation facilities in Indus, south Springbank, Langdon, Harmony, and Conrich are estimated to cost $134 million.
“As a council, we have to figure out how to pay for these things,” said RVC Division 3 Coun. and Reeve Crystal Kissel in an interview following the first reading of the proposed bylaw. “Do we want everyone to pay or do we just look at having certain areas that have greater need. Is that where we're targeting? I think that's one of our biggest questions right now–how do we want that to look?”
The proposed bylaw provides a framework for levy collection on the recreation facilities that will target a specific benefiting area, which are split into east and west catchments, while the levy collection for the fire stations will be centralized into a single grouping.
The proposed levy rate for the fire stations is $1,471 per acre. For the recreation facilities the rate is higher, at $5,806 per acre for the east catchment and $2,759 per acre for the west catchment. The projected 20-year levy funding for the fire station at the per acre amount will provide the County with $5,963,670, while the recreation levy will collect $26,084,255 over 20 years.
In the council report it states that as per the Municipal Government Act (MGA), which allows municipalities to pass bylaws requiring the payment of off-site levies, soft services off-site levies “allow a municipality to recover capital costs for types of infrastructure based on the degree of benefit the development will receive from the facilities”.
Kissel stated that since municipalities have only recently been able to implement this type of levy under the current version of the MGA, the County has discovered that the whole process is rather complicated.
“Given that we have no real model to go off of it's going to take us a little bit to get this right,” said Kissel. “We're not in a hurry to just push something through and we are listening to what the residents have to say and what the developers have to say, and how that will affect them.”
County administration conducted a community engagement inquiry throughout October and November of this year with “interested and affected members of the community.”
Approximately 230 comments about the proposed framework were collected and at the summary level by administration and were presented in the council report.
The themes of the engagement consisted of a desire for RVC to remain competitive and attractive from a development standpoint, and for the levy rates to remain fair, equitable, reasonable, and stable over time. The final theme was for the general support of the County to have sufficient fire servicing across RVC’s communities.
Council seemed to be in agreement on the proposed levy bylaw, but there was some concern as to why the Recreation and Fire Services levies were paired together in the same bylaw and not given their own specific bylaw.
“I’m in favour of a levy but why would we create this as one levy?” asked RVC Division 5 Coun. Greg Boehlke. “We’ve asked to basically endorse these costs on a master services plan that council hasn’t endorsed.”
RVC Executive Director for Operations, Byron Riemann, reassured Boehlke that administration could make the necessary changes.
“If council wants [two separate bylaws], they could create two bylaws.”
In the end, council compelled administration to have the bylaw amended so the Fire Services and Recreation levies be considered by each their own bylaws. However, the overall structure of the levy framework remained unchanged when it passed a first reading with unanimous support from council.
