By Sheldon Spackman

Year In Review

Lacombe County finds success despite challenging year

Dec 27, 2019 | 8:00 AM

The reeve of Lacombe County is describing 2019 as a successful, yet challenging year.

Paula Law says despite that the challenges they faced, a lot of good work was done.

“We’ve been working on Intermunicipal Collaboration Frameworks (ICF), and we have to have them done by April 1 of next year,” she explains. “We have 15 of those to do and we’ve accomplished a number of them. We’ve finished with our smaller communities like Alix, Bentley, Clive and Eckville and we’re working on the ones with the City of Lacombe, Town of Blackfalds and finishing-up with the Summer Village of Gull Lake and Ponoka County.”

There are also continuing efforts on creating an Intermunicipal Development Plan (IDP) with the Town of Sylvan Lake and the seven surrounding summer villages, according to Law.

Elsewhere, Law notes the successful implementation of the County’s Agricultural Plastics Recycling Program, new in-house School Resource Peace Officer Program, the completion of numerous road projects despite challenging weather, and significant uptake on the County’s Development Incentive Grant.

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“Out in Mirror, we’ve had two businesses take us up on that,” she exclaims. “We’ve got a number of different projects that we’re doing with that like looking at the servicing going underneath Highway 2 from the City of Lacombe to our west area.”

Law admits, however, the economy has been the biggest challenge over the past year.

“We’ve got the energy sector that’s down, we had the 35 per cent shallow gas tax reduction mandated by the Province for the shallow gas companies,” she explains. “Out of all the rural municipalities, we were in the top 15 that were most affected on that. We’ve written off about $600,000 worth of property taxes due to bankruptcies from energy companies.”

Law acknowledges that both people and businesses have struggled with job losses as a result, adding the weather has created additional challenges as well.

“Our Ag producers, there’s a lot of crops that are still out,” laments Law. “It was a wet, rainy year. It’s been challenging all the way around on different things.”

Following a provincial election in the spring and federal election in the fall, Law reveals the impacts have been felt by Lacombe County.

“Provincially, their budget didn’t really come out until early fall and there were some implications from that,” she exclaims. “The shallow gas well reduction on that one, it was a net-zero for us because we were reimbursed through the education requisition. That won’t be in place for next year, there’s a number of different things that we don’t have at this point in time for next year.”

On the upside, Law acknowledges some red-tape reduction and corresponding initiatives that will likely help going forward.

“Also in the province, we’ve got paying for rural policing,” says Law. “We don’t have an exact number of how it’s going to affect yet because there are still some questions we don’t have answered yet. So we’ll be dealing with that next year too.”

In addition, Law anticipates a number of road construction projects to get underway in 2020.

“We’ve got some paving projects on the go, we’re going to be looking at continuing on that west side servicing out of the City of Lacombe. We’ve got a number of different things. We all know that we have some challenges going forward, but council and staff will strive to provide the best service we can.”