Red Deer Minute: Issue 274

Red Deer Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Red Deer politics

📅 This Week In Red Deer: 📅

• The Special Committee of the Whole meets today at 10:30 am, and one of the items on the agenda is a workshop on the future of Red Deer's water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities. Part of the session asks Councillors what should guide a decision on how stormwater is paid for: the City's roughly 560 kilometers of storm network is funded today through property taxes, and the alternative under study is a dedicated stormwater charge based on a property's runoff or impervious area and collected through the existing water bill. Administration's pre-reading notes that under the current model stormwater competes with other municipal priorities and that tax-exempt properties such as government buildings and churches contribute to storm costs without paying toward them, while a rate-based charge would require new rate design, additional property information, and updated billing. The City manages roughly $4 billion in water-related infrastructure, supplying drinking water from Gasoline Alley to Ponoka and treating wastewater from Sylvan Lake, Lacombe, and Olds. 
  
  
• The Special Committee of the Whole will also work through the sixth in a series of workshops today on setting up a Municipally Controlled Corporation to run Red Deer's electric utility. Council authorized the City to establish and control a newly formed electric utility corporation at a public hearing in June 2025, directing the City Manager to take the steps needed to do so under provincial legislation. Utilities Modernization Lead Kate Staples writes that the workshops are meant to establish the corporation's foundational governance structure, and claims the transition will improve the City's financial discipline through clearly defined financial boundaries and costs for services while continuing to deliver dividends to the City. Administration also argues that a locally owned and directed distribution utility can stay responsive to local needs and business opportunities. 
  
  
• Council also receives a report tomorrow setting out four options for cutting parking requirements on subsidized housing and temporary care facilities, after a January motion identified parking as a significant barrier to building subsidized housing in Red Deer. The first option would have Council direct staff to write an internal procedure letting a development officer approve variances of up to 70% without referring them to the Municipal Planning Commission. The second, which Administration recommends, would write criteria into the zoning bylaw to guide those approvals and require anything beyond 70% to go to the Commission or Council. The third would drop the baseline requirement for qualifying non-market housing to 30% of the standard rate outright, delivering the full reduction without a variance and therefore without notice to adjacent landowners. The fourth would have Council lobby the Minister of Municipal Affairs for the power Calgary and Edmonton already have to register affordable housing obligations against title so they survive a change of owner. 
  
  
• Red Deer City Council has ordered a review of how the City regulates cannabis retail, following its decision to reject a proposed store within sight of St. Joseph High School. Councillor Cassandra Curtis's motion, approved 6-3, directs Administration to look at what other municipalities do and to assess the implications of 150-metre, 200-metre, and 300-metre setbacks from schools, daycares, health facilities, and liquor stores. Curtis also wants Administration to examine treating cannabis sales the way the zoning bylaw treats liquor, beer, and wine sales, noting that alcohol retail is a permitted use in the commercial zones where the rejected store was proposed. The current 150-metre setback dates from a 2024 decision that halved the previous 300-metre buffer in the areas where cannabis retail is a discretionary use, broadly the downtown and Gaetz Avenue corridor. Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools board chair Chris Andrew had urged Council to restore the 300-metre buffer around all schools, daycares, pre-schools, and youth hubs. Administration will return by the end of the year with a work plan.
  
  
• The Central Alberta Economic Partnership is retooling as the Province prepares to cut its operational funding, and about a dozen of its member municipalities, Red Deer among them, met in Innisfail to confirm support for its mission. The Province has announced it will cut operating funding next spring for all nine of Alberta's Regional Economic Development Alliances, of which the Partnership is one. Membership has fallen from more than 40 municipalities to roughly two dozen since the group was created in 1998, and new economic development bodies have emerged alongside it, including Red Deer D.R.I.V.E. Executive director Paul Salvatore said members wanted a real game plan for the group's activities at the same time the Province is rolling back funding, and the group released a three-year business plan in May aimed at becoming financially independent. It has also created a marketing organization called Team Central Alberta to sell the region to investors, and has backed the long-envisioned Howse Pass route to Golden, British Columbia. 

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