About 60 residents attended an information open house at the Sundre Legion on April 24 put on by Mountain View County.
The meeting was held to gather input into proposed amendments to the municipal development plan and land use bylaw regarding a number of environmentally significant areas.
Reeve Bruce Beattie says administration will compile input gathered at the open house and then make a followup report to council.
“The next process is to come back to council,” said Beattie. “We will have a conversation with council and administration whether or not we want to continue with the process or do we want to put it off for a period of time and look at the whole municipal development plan in the context of a larger change in policy.
“We collected a lot of input from the open houses (another open house was held April 10) and staff will now be consolidating the information and then council will have an opportunity to review that.”
Areas involved in the proposed changes include properties in the Bearberry, Bergen and Water Valley-Winchell Lake neighbourhoods.
“As part of the (recent) subdivision and development application review process, administration utilized the 2014 provincial environmentally significant areas data by Fiera Biological Consulting along with the existing 2008 ESA Summit Report data,” administration said in a briefing note to council.
“The result of the change would mean 15,798 acres out of 662,087 acres of agricultural preservation area land would now be located within the potential multi-lot residential development area.
“While this proposed change includes a large land mass becoming potentially developable, the majority of these lands are long, narrow strips that may pose challenges for developing new lots within these areas and amounts to only two per cent removed from the agricultural preservation area.”
The proposed amendments are not related to rezoning properties and property assessment will continue to be agriculture if the land is currently assessed and being used for agriculture, council heard.
A number of residents have expressed concerns with the proposed changes.
“My concerns are twofold: the lack of community engagement in this process prior to the public hearing, and the need to reconsider our designations in light of climate change,” said resident Sally Banks.
