Municipalities mandated to form collaborative agreements

By Tim Kalinowski on January 6, 2018.

tkalinowski@medicinehatnews.com @MHNTimKal

Over the next few months the provincial government will be mandating that every municipality in Alberta make an Intermunicipal Collaborative Framework agreement with every other municipality sharing its borders. This will include, for the first time, any rural municipalities which share borders with each other.

“It’s the first in Canada for this type of change, and it is just a start,” says County of Newell CAO Kevin Stephenson. “The intent of this, as I read it, is to get municipalities to look at what it costs to supply their service levels, and can they do it better in partnership.”

“The Government of Alberta feels if municipalities work together and collaborate together, they are going to be able to provide services to citizens and businesses more efficiently and probably more cost-effectively than if each municipality does it by themselves,” concurs Doug Henderson, CAO of Cypress County.

That is the intent, agrees County of 40 Mile CAO Dale Brown, but the ultimate proof of the concept will come when municipalities sit down to hammer out the details.

“Each municipality is going to have its own autonomy, but there may be things which will be of benefit to both,” speculates Brown. “And that’s what we will review and discuss, and see if we can come to some sort of an agreement on.”

Henderson does not anticipate this negotiation process will pose many problems between rural municipalities because they have fewer overlapping or competing interests at their borders.

“I think between Cypress County and other rural municipalities these types of conversations are going to be easy, but between rural municipalities and urban ones much harder,” says Henderson. “We have already got agreements in place with our rural neighbours for fire services, but now we need to look at a whole bunch of other things.

“How people use recreation facilities in the County of Newell and 40 Mile, for instance— and, if so, should we be involved in the cost of sharing those facilities in some small way. The other thing might be in managing a road network. If someone is fixing up a road between Cypress County and the County of 40 Mile, you can make sure the road maintenance, and consistency of the construction standard, is similar municipality to municipality.”

Stephenson concurs with Henderson, but anticipates the provincial government will eventually have to contend with some push-back on ICFs regardless.

“A lot of municipalities are scared to lose autonomy,” states Stephenson, “and Alberta does have one of the fewest number of municipalities for the number of population in the province in Canada. You would tend then to think it is one of the most efficient, and it probably is, but there is so much more that can be done. To have seven CAOs in a region, seven councils and seven finance departments that deal with something like 25,000 people — it just doesn’t make logical sense.”

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