Rocky View County will be outlining its opening bargaining position at a closed-door session of council on Sept. 14, as the municipality gets set to enter into negotiations with the City of Calgary over the proposed annexation of the Shepard Industrial Area.
“That is just a beginning conversation council is having with our facilitators who are helping us through the negotiation process with the City of Calgary,” explained Rocky View County’s (RVC) director of Legislative and Inter-governmental Services, Amy Zaluski. “It’s very early stages, just setting up the process.”
The City of Calgary first notified RVC of its hopes to annex the lands last September. At the time, Josh White, director of growth strategies for the City of Calgary, said the annexation would be a way to further the larger municipality's ability to grow, both for its residential and commercial industrial sectors.
“It’s to make sure we have adequate land supply to accommodate the development and growth of the city,” he said.
Zaluski said the County intends to begin negotiations “in good faith” with the City.
“That is part of the reason for hiring a facilitator to help us through those negotiations; so hopefully we can avoid conflict and contention, and reach an agreement,” she said.
The area of the proposed annexation agreement includes all the lands which were formerly covered by the County’s own Shepard Industrial Area Structure Plan (about 747 hectares), and additional lands to the north of that. The total land area which the City proposes to annex covers about 1,676 hectares. The boundaries for the proposed annexation run just south of Highway 560 (Glenmore Trail), west of Range Road 282, east of Range Road 284, and north of the Canadian Pacific Railway line which runs through the area.
The region is located west of Langdon and abuts against the eastern outskirts of the city of Calgary.
These initial negotiations with the City will be confidential, Zaluski said, but will eventually be taken to the public. She added every annexation includes a public consultation component during the process.
“The negotiation team will decide at which point in the process they want to go out and speak with landowners,” she said. “Those are affected parties, and we just want to make sure everyone has an opportunity to be heard and see what proposals are being put forward, and what that could look like for their lands if they are to be annexed.”
The County had put in a lot of work and resources over the past two years to have the Shepard lands designated as an industrial area for County use, including detailed plans and public consultations, before the proposed annexation request came in from the City of Calgary last year.
Zaluski expected there would be plenty to talk about with City of Calgary representatives in the coming days, but acknowledged the annexation request did not come as a complete surprise.
“If you look at the Rocky View County and City of Calgary Intermunicipal Development Plan, these lands have been identified as potentially future City of Calgary growth areas since the inception of that IDP (in 2012),” she said. “So (it’s) not a huge surprise. It is something we knew could happen eventually.”
This is the first annexation request to the County from the City of Calgary since 2007, according to Zaluski, and the first request the County has had from any of its neighbouring municipalities since Airdrie in 2012.
Zaluski noted the amount of land involved in the current request is not nearly as large as the City’s last request in 2007.
“This is quite a bit smaller than that one,” she confirmed. “I think that one was about 25,000 acres (about 10,000 hectares). So that was a really large annexation. We had a period of time from about 2005 to 2010 where it wasn’t just the City of Calgary. We had a lot of annexation requests. That was a time when Alberta was really growing so a lot of our urban neighbours like the City of Airdrie, the Town of Crossfield, and the City of Chestermere all had annexation needs at that point in time.”
According to Zaluski, it could take 12 to 18 months before any final decision would be made on the proposed annexation.
—With files from Jordan Stricker/Rocky View Weekly
