EDMONTON — Alberta’s rural municipalities will need to learn to play in the same sandbox if they want to receive regional funding from the provincial government.
“They have to learn how to or they won’t get the funding. It’s that simple,” said municipal affairs minister Doug Griffiths.
The recent provincial budget reallocated $50 million from the operating portion of the Municipal Sustainability Initiative grant to a regional funding program designed to help municipalities work together in regional programs.
“The funding will still be there for municipalities, but we are looking at doing innovative, collaborative projects,” Griffiths told the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties convention.
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“It’s about collaboration, it’s about innovation, but it’s not prescriptive. It doesn’t say what they have to do. They can come up with, you name the subject matter, it could be on housing, be on emergency services, it could be on water, it could be on transportation, it could be on economic development. It’s up to them to find out what they can do to make their community be stronger and more prosperous, which is the beauty of the program.”
Camrose County reeve Don Gregorwich said the regional collaboration is a continuation of previous work encouraging counties to work together.
“The principle is excellent. It’s very realistic. We do need to co-operate more with our neighbours. That’s reality,” said Gregorwich.
“Municipalities are going to have to set aside the past disagreements and past feuds and start fresh and say, ‘where can we go from here?’ We have to think about the future.”
Gregorwich said his county is already working with neighbouring municipalities.
AAMD&C president Bob Barss said he expects a lot of the funding to be used to hire consultants to build interim development plans, particularly in areas where rural and urban municipalities are close together.
