BOWDEN — Starting in May, Bowden will once again have a bylaw officer, having been without one for roughly 18 months, according to the town's mayor.
Mayor Robb Stuart says that position will be shared with the Town of Olds. Current Olds RCMP detachment commanding officer Staff Sgt. Warren Wright, who is retiring April 25, will be that bylaw officer. He begins his new job May 8.
Wright told the Albertan that he answered an ad for an Olds community peace officer.
"I am very much looking forward to the career change from policing to municipal enforcement," he said in an email.
“We were going to go with Innisfail a while ago and share one with them, and then they shared with Penhold instead of us,” Stuart said during an interview with the Albertan.
Stuart confirmed that Red Deer County bylaw officers are still coming into Bowden occasionally to enforce bylaws but said to his knowledge, they’re only coming into town when they can, maybe 15 hours a month.
“We'd actually tell them what to come here for, whether it be a vehicle that we're having trouble with or whatever,” Stuart said.
“And they came on a patrol every once in a while, but mainly when they came on a patrol, they focused on traffic violations, like speeders at the which is good, but they weren't really doing much for bylaw, like checking for unsightly properties s or things like that,” he added.
“If they're in this area, they swing through town, and maybe they come in once a week. Maybe they come in two or three times a week. It just depends on what their workload is,” he said.
He said the municipality looked at hiring county officers on a full-time basis, but the cost was deemed to be too high.
Stuart was asked if the combination of the new bylaw officer and visits from Red Deer County bylaw officers will be enough.
“Well, I don't know. We'll have to see,” he said. “It'll definitely be a huge improvement because we haven't done anything for a long time.
“Everybody's kind of gotten away with things just because of lack of even being proactive and letting people know. So now, at least, I think it'll improve a lot for the first probably three months or whatever.
“I imagine there'll be a few complaints about, ‘well, why are you enforcing this? I've done this for two years now, so now you're telling me it's not (legal),’ and it's ‘yeah, this in the bylaw, you're in violation of the bylaw. ‘”
Stuart stressed that most of the bylaw offenders seem to be “bad actors.”
“They do it, and then other people see them doing it, so it’s kind of like at work, right?
“You see your worker that leaves early every day, and you think, ‘Well, why am I staying here?’ So you start doing it, and it just ends up to be very prevalent. And so that's what I see with the town.
“So hopefully, once we start enforcing things and just not being rude about it, but saying ‘sorry, but we're going to have to ticket you,’ (things will improve).”
He said many of the violations involve things like vehicles parked on the street for too long.
