Poole says 2019 a year of planning for Blackfalds

“They’re looking at opening new businesses,” states Poole. “We haven’t heard exactly which ones are coming in but we’ve had indications that it is pretty well sold out for the first phase of that and we’re looking forward to whatever will come in there. We have all the infrastructure completed in there, they did that over the past year, so it will be ready for companies to come in and build.”

Other accomplishments for The Town over the past year according to Poole include the opening of new parks, the continued hosting of major festivals and events and the ongoing growth of the community’s trail system.

However, Poole notes these accomplishments have not come without challenges as well.

“Alberta in general is facing challenges,” Poole says. “We need to find ways to of course to make pipelines happen, that’s an ongoing issue across the province. That has trickled down to our community and we’ve had a lot of people who are not employed or under-employed and there are some people struggling and we recognize that and appreciate their concerns.”

In Blackfalds specifically, Poole says they need to find ways to keep growth and development ongoing.

“Developers are basically looking for the rebound in our economy,” explains Poole. “Other challenges within the last year have been some of the downloading or the decisions made by other orders of government that has taken up a lot of time with things like cannabis regulation across the province. We’re looking at two elections that are coming up and that type of event always causes uncertainty because we don’t know what we can really expect.”

With the Alberta government recently reaching funding deals with Calgary and Edmonton, Poole says communities outside those centres are now looking for a deal of their own.

“We’re looking for our provincial government to provide realistic and good MSI (Municipal Sustainability Initiative) funding,” exclaims Poole. “We need to have understanding of what amounts of money that is going to come forward in order that we can move ahead. We need to know what to expect in order to make really good, sound judgements and decisions as we move forward.”

According to Poole, 2019 will be a year of planning for the community.

“We have a very active group that is working towards a dual ice deck and we are looking at getting some architectural renderings on that to help make decisions as to where our next step will be,” reveals Poole. “We have to be very cognizant of the fact that we can’t expect our citizens during an economic downturn to really shoulder a lot of heavy increases. So we have to make sure that we’re really understanding what the needs are and meeting the needs and not over-extending ourselves.”

Poole wishes everyone throughout central Alberta a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

“I’d like to tell people within our community to stay positive,” states Poole. “Keep that feedback coming back to council because we appreciate the feedback and we appreciate how open a community that we have. I’m working with one of the best councils in Alberta right now and I very much appreciate their hard work.”

by Sheldon Spackman

Poole says 2019 a year of planning for Blackfalds

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