A meeting with Parkland Foundation member municipalities and officials from Alberta Municipal Affairs has produced fresh optimism the provincial government will significantly help with the cost of replacing the aging Autumn Glen Lodge.
As well, provincial officials also told senior municipal officials that a new funding formula should make the long-awaited multi-million dollar project for low-income seniors a reality without having to raise taxes in the six Parkland Foundation partner communities.
“We had much better hope and relaxation on the fact that we would be able to afford to build it. The feasibility of it seemed much better by the end of the meeting,” said Innisfail mayor Brian Spiller, adding he was pleased with some of the financial proposals offered at the meeting. “They said we should be able to fund this between the loan and the forgivable part of it and the efficiencies of the new building without increasing the requisition to our communities, which made us very interested.”
For most of the past year there has been strongly voiced concerns from the member communities, which include Innisfail, Penhold, Bowden, Elnora, Delburne and Red Deer County, that the provincial government, which had ceased funding for capital seniors housing projects, would not offer any financial support to Parkland Foundation to replace Autumn Glen Lodge, which is more than a half century old.
However, at the April 2 meeting in Innisfail with Parkland Foundation officials, along with senior representatives from the six member municipalities, representatives from Alberta Municipal Affairs announced the government was developing a new lending policy that the provincial cabinet has recently approved for the Alberta Social Housing Corporation (ASHC). The new policy gives ASHC, a government agency that owns the province's portfolio of social housing and manages the agreements associated with the housing facilities, the authority to lend to eligible housing providers or projects that maintain or add to a housing supply.
The new lending policy is expected to allow for loans for capital projects such as Autumn Glen, with part of it being “forgivable” although that amount has yet to be determined.
As well, there was strong assurances given to the foundation and its municipal partners that the new policy will not force increased requisition payments from the six communities that would lead to potentially hefty tax increases in each municipality.
“I was worried about having to carry some of the debt. We were told that was not going to be the case. That is good news,” said Penhold mayor Dennis Cooper, whose town contributed a $4,826 requisition payment to the foundation in 2013.
This news was especially important to Bowden officials who say their residents would have been hard-pressed to pay more than the $$2,131 requisition they contributed to the foundation in 2013.
“We are always trying to pinch nickels and pennies and yet we still want to pay our fair share as the Parkland Foundation has a few Bowden residents in there,” said Mayor Robb Stuart, who said there are now as many as seven former Bowden residents at Autumn Glen Lodge. “They didn't get down to actually how it is going to work but they definitely said there would be funding available and that probably our requisitions would not go up.”
Trisha Anderson, public affairs officer with Alberta Municipal Affairs, said details of what the new lending policy will contain, including the rates and its repayable and forgivable portions, should be unveiled this summer, with an update on its progress to Parkland Foundation in June.
She said for Parkland Foundation to be successful in getting an ASHC loan it will have to prepare a needs analysis to show ongoing seniors housing in the community is still required. As well, the condition of the Autumn Glen Lodge property will have to be assessed and Parkland Foundation will have to give an updated business plan, endorsed by the member municipalities, that contains capital and operating budgets.
“And all of that will have to be sent to the minister and then from there these projects will be approved or not approved. That is the process,” said Anderson. “This will take time but of course under this new lending policy we are committed to working with the housing management bodies that are going to be eligible to borrow. Autumn Glen Lodge is an excellent example of what we would want to do once the policy is ready to go.”
Meanwhile, Connie Huelsman, chair of the board of the Parkland Foundation, would not say whether a new business manager has been hired to oversee the next steps of the process. The hiring of a business manager for the Autumn Glen project was announced at an Innisfail council meeting last month.
“I am not saying anything at this time as we have to see what our next steps will be as a board,” said Huelsman, a Red Deer County councillor and the rural municipality's representative on the board. “We are just getting to the planning stages. We are really just sitting down at the table with municipal affairs and seeing what we should be doing to get our ducks in a row.
“We are all hopeful,” she added.
