CARSTAIRS – The Town of Carstairs will alongside other municipal partners be applying for a provincial grant to study regional policing options within the municipality as well as the surrounding area, says mayor Lance Colby.
Colby and administrative staff met with RCMP officials and Minister of Public Safety Mike Ellis during the recent Alberta Municipalities Association conference in Edmonton.
“We talked to them and they are in favour of doing a study,” said Colby. “The RCMP are in favour of it and the minister said he likes the idea of looking at it and doing the study.”
Each applying community would be eligible for up to $30,000 under the grant program.
“We will be able to put together some money to do the research and get a study done," he said. “Each community will apply and then we will combine the funding into one so we can get the study done.”
Carstairs, Mountain View County, Cremona and Didsbury elected officials and administration have been meeting with RCMP members in recent weeks to discuss regional policing in Carstairs and area.
“The idea is to build the detachment in Carstairs,” he said. “Didsbury would still have their detachment but our members would deploy from here. All of us feel it would assist in lowering the response times for us all.
“We are talking to the town and the RCMP. We have to build a detachment for our area because we are over 5,000 population and we might as well build with the future in mind,” he said.
“That would mean building it big enough for the expanding growth of our town and surrounding area.”
The municipalities have been exploring the possibility of applying for the $30,000 provincial grant to study the matter, he said.
“So, we are looking at that to see if we can get the grant. If we do get it, then we would be able to do a proper study on the effectiveness of a regional police force," he said.
“We are busy collecting information on population sizes, growth rates of communities and all that so we have something to present.”
Mountain View County deputy reeve Greg Harris, Didsbury mayor Rhonda Hunter, Cremona mayor Tim Hagen, and RCMP superintendent Wayne Nichols as well as Didsbury RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve Browne last meet on Sept. 19.
Mayor Colby said the work on regional policing in the Carstairs area has been underway for many years.
“I’ve been talking about this for years,” he said. “We have been meeting with the RCMP since about 2004, 2005, looking at a better way to police our area.”
