My main goal for the city of St. Albert is to create and support a Financially Sustainable Future. This means ensuring our children and grandchildren will be able to afford and enjoy living in St. Albert the way we have. We can do this by working toward the following smaller goals:
1. Reducing personal property taxes through cutting costs and attracting industries / businesses to set up in St. Albert so they can pay more of the tax burden.
2. Improving St. Albert’s Transportation through:
advising the City Manager (when and where possible) to only work on one road (at the same time) crossing the Sturgeon River in order to minimize the impact to St. Albert's drivers.
improved public transit
continuing to widen Ray Gibbon Drive
set aside road allowance for Ray Gibbon to eventually connect to highway 2 north of St. Albert
creating better traffic light timing on our streets.
3. Improving St. Albert’s Recreational Opportunities by:
either adding a second indoor swimming pool capable of hosting swimming lessons or converting the Grosvenor outdoor pool to an indoor pool.
adding additional sheets of ice for hockey and skating (there have been proposals for doing this with private funds instead of public funds).
The challenge to item 3 is paying for these wonderful facilities!
I believe that the first way is to start accruing funds for them by raising funds outside of property taxes, preferably using a professional fund raiser (like the wonderful people who plan many events for STARS® Air Ambulance).
The second way is to eliminate unnecessary spending and financial waste.
The final and less glamorous way is to cut back on our project spending and do one project at a time. After all, there is no way we could possibly afford to do everything right now!
Please note that there were also changes to the Municipal Government Act which will ensure that new construction developments will pay much more toward new facilities.