BOWDEN - Council has voted to expand a one-person bylaw committee. It's also been given a mission to periodically review town bylaws and suggest improvements to council, if any are deemed to be needed.
In addition to Coun. Carol Pion (previously the lone member of the committee), the committee is now expected to include Mayor Robb Stuart as well as councillors Kerry Kelm and Wayne Milaney plus one or two members of the public.
Pion made the suggestion to expand the committee, saying Olds has a similar one that periodically examines bylaws and suggests improvements.
The decision also came on the heels of a 16-minute discussion about what to do about some bylaws which are seen to have "grey areas," thereby making enforcement difficult, according to chief executive officer Jacqui Molyneux.
An example of the problems -- which produced some extensive discussion -- is a requirement that things like mobile homes must sit on "hard surfaces."
Mayor Robb Stuart said the problem is if trailers or mobile homes sit on grass and are then moved off there onto the street, that leaves grass and mud on the street, which then has to be cleaned up by town crews.
Molyneaux explained that the grey area regarding trailers and mobile homes centred around what is and is not a hard surface. For example, councillors discussed whether sidewalk blocks or gravelled areas -- including back alleys -- constitute "hard surfaces."
Coun. Sandy Gamble said the situation has to be fixed because as it is, "it looks terrible."
"I don't think we want Bowden to look like -- trailer park trash," she said, later saying it simply "looks trashy."
"The other thing we want to make sure is that our town looks presentable; that people want to move here. If you have trash all over the place, people say 'I am not living in that place.' That's why we get all the complaints when people come to town about the hotel and that strip mall," Gamble said.
"When they drive around and there's trash in everybody's yard and garbage all over the street because they haven't bothered to get two containers, they don't want to move here."
Kelm objected to that, saying motorhomes that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are not "trailer trash."
"They park their vehicle where they want to park it, right? On their grass, on their lot. As long as they're not letting their grass get up too high or causing a nuisance otherwise, it just sits there," he said.
"I'm just wondering. For me, we're too complicated here. What we want to do is the area to look decent," Kelm said later. "Now we're trying to say, 'OK, which of these 14 different ways are we going to classify as a hard surface?'
"They'll want to comply if our bylaws are reasonable. They can't be unreasonable. We can put bylaws in there and we can law 'em to death with all the rules and people just won't be able to do it and there'll be a backlash."
Milaney added a little levity to the discussion, noting jokingly that as an "old farm boy" he had some ideas on how to beautify the community.
"If I want to put an H-40 grain tractor on my lawn, I probably can't do that either because it's not a hard surface," he said.
"But if I weed whack around it and put Christmas lights on it at Christmas, I think I'm adding to the community, right? Or a plowshare, whatever," he added. "I might want to put a threshing machine on my front lawn."
"I know where there's an old one," Gamble said with a laugh.
