Mountain View County councillor Al Kemmere says he plans to make a number of recommendations to the board of the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties (AAMDC) regarding the new Alberta Wetland Policy.
The policy was the focus of a one-day workshop held in Red Deer on June 12. The workshop was co-hosted by the AAMDC, Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development and the Alberta Association of Urban Municipalities.
Kemmere is a board member of the AAMDC and the county's representative on the association.
The intent of the workshop was to “explore solutions to enable more effective and integrated wetland management decisions” and to give municipal representatives a chance to provide input into the implementation of the new policy.
Topics discussed at the workshop included “opportunities for alignment and integration of regulatory processes between different levels of government.”
The new Alberta Wetland Policy replaces and updates the Wetland Management in Settled Areas of Alberta: Interim Policy, which was put in place in 1993.
According to the province, the new policy “provides the required tools and knowledge systems to support the province's wetland management needs into the future.”
Kemmere says the workshop discussion focused a good deal on the three approaches for wetlands when it comes to future development planning: avoidance, mitigation and compensation.
“Avoidance is trying to avoid the wetland as much as possible and its impacts,” said Kemmere. “Mitigation is if you are going to affect the wetlands, you mitigate the damage as much as possible. And there's always compensation, so if you have no choice, then you put a price on the wetlands, a market value discussion.
“A lot of the discussion is if you cannot avoid the wetland, how do you set a fair price? How do you establish a value of that wetland? If you are going to go into a wetland and change that wetland, they've (province) has an offset formula that they are establishing that will be as much as eight to one acres.”
Asked what he plans to tell the AAMDC board, he said, “I'm going to tell the board that I have a concern with just putting a price tag on wetlands. If we are going to put a price tag on wetlands, it has to be substantial enough that it drives the developers back to the avoidance.
“Putting a too low price tag on wetlands just allows those who have the money or those who have the ability to pass it on to other people, and then we aren't looking after those wetlands. That's going to be my position.”
Any offsets for the use of wetlands should be applied locally, he said.
“The recovery for that wetland should be as local as possible,” he said.
The wetland policy does not apply to seasonal wetlands such as those that happen in the spring in farmers' fields, he noted.
“We need to be clear on that so that the farmers in the area understand where this affects them and where it doesn't,” he said.
The province says new policy will achieve a number of key functions:
• incorporate wetlands of all classes, including marsh, bog, fen, swamp and open water wetland, throughout the province.
• provide regulatory certainty, clarity and predictability to proponents and regulators.
• enable a clear and robust decision-making framework for approval writers.
• acknowledge and enable the roles of municipal, regional and provincial planning in the decision-making process.
