FORMERLY THE ROCKY VIEW FIVE VILLAGE WEEKLY
Volume 35, Number 34	OFFICIAL NEWSPAPER FOR THE MD OF ROCKY VIEW #44	Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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Commentary
Keeping rural things rural makes sense
Enrique Massot

While a city’s accepted role is to concentrate population and services, Alberta’s rural municipalities are custodians of valuable resources such as farm and ranchlands, prairie and foothills landscape, streams, wetlands, bogs, and wildlife habitat.

Common sense indicates that high-density development should be confined to urban centres, while the countryside should be kept as a valuable greenbelt around cities, towns and villages. Rural areas also contain valuable food-producing lands that would be highly strategic in the eventuality of future high fuel costs and shortages. The water we all use collects on watersheds that work efficiently as long as the vegetation remains healthy.

However, in the last 13 years, after dumping regional planning and allowing all municipalities full rights to develop, put rural municipalities in competition for tax revenue against their urban counterparts. Free from previous regional dictates, the MD of Rocky View began to approve larger and denser residential subdivisions as well as area structure plans such as Balzac west, planning to accommodate 40,000 residents, another planning to house 60,000 west of the City of Calgary on Highway 8 being in the works. Some suggested that Rocky View’s rural identity was passé, "rurban" being its new designation. However, those plans appear to have been too ambitious, and they are compromised by insufficient water and sewer.

However, the trend has potential to add rural sprawl around an already sprawling city, with no certainty that additional tax revenue from new development will offset costly additional infrastructure.

In recent years, increasing urban-rural conflicts showed the limits of the laissez-faire approach. The actions being taken right now to keep rural things rural by reserving urban development for cities and towns may still save the region’s beauty and natural resources.

Politicians from municipalities who formed the Calgary Regional Partnership have given a thumbs up to green belts, while abandoning hazardous growth and increasing densities in urban centres.

The proposal is expected to greatly reduce future urban expansion into rural land in the Calgary region over the next 50 years.

The provincial government, meanwhile, has produced a draft land-use framework that favours growth in certain areas and limiting it in others, while encouraging higher-density infill development to help preserve the environment and agricultural land.

The draft framework also proposes the use of tools such as transfer of development credits to direct development, towards suitable areas while allowing for conservation of sensitive lands. Transfer of development credits would also allow developers and landowners to share in the financial benefits of growth.

It also proposes to put limits to individual municipalities’ decision powers by creating a new, regional level of planning and by ensuring that municipal development plans and decisions fall in line with provincial and regional direction.

If those laudable goals come to fruition, the Calgary region may save its soul and become an example for the world.