Eager to get Highway 56 upgraded through the Town of Stettler, council pleaded with government officials face-to-face last week during the fall convention of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association.
“We asked them if they will consider piece-mealing it into two projects,” Mayor Dick Richards said Monday.
Town council and senior management lobbied Alberta Transportation to reconstruct the crumbling stretch of highway — between 46 Street and 57 Street — that was last upgraded more than 25 years ago.
“They view Highway 56 as one big continuous project,” Richards said.
Transportation officials didn’t set any timelimes for work on the highway, he said.
That includes long-term plans by Alberta Transportation to upgrade and realign the highway in the north part of the town, with a roundabout in the northeast, which officials have said could occur in about 30 years or more.
“In town is what we’re most concerned with,” Richards said.
Structure of the highway in town has seriously deteriorated to a stage that it deters proper drainage of water, and heavy vehicles cause picture frames to fall off walls and shake windows, said a report from Melissa Robbins, the town’s director of operational services.
With other government ministry officials, town officials also requested more policing in the region and provincial assistance to clean up brownfields and sites of former fuel stations.
Richards said RCMP officials plan to attend a council meeting later this year to discuss local needs for more officers.
“It was a positive response,” Richards said.
Town officials requested that three vacant highway positions be filled and that a regional highway unit for central Alberta based in Blackfalds locate a substation in Stettler to best serve the east-central region.
Currently, the town is subsidizing rural policing, which is a provincial cost, “and it’s not fair,” Richards said.
“We tried to build the best business plan to show them what are needs are here.”
With assistance from the provincial government to remediate brownfields of contaminated sites of former fuel stations, town representatives spoke with officials from Alberta Environment, who gave little good news.
“They’re not putting any pressure on the oil companies,” Richards said. “We will work with the government in the process.”
Again with no timelines from the provincial government, council continues to wait for a strategy from the Brownfield Redevelopment Working Group in order for the town to take steps for cleaning several brownfields and former fuel station sites.
Currently, the Brownfield Redevelopment Working Group is working on a provincial strategy with representatives on the group from the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, along with homebuilders, developers, consulting engineers and the petroleum industry.
For the past several years, the town has sent letters to these companies to clean up the sites, with no action taken, the mayor said.
Richards also confirmed that the provincial government plans to extend terms of municipal councils and school boards to four years from the current three years, starting in the next local elections in October 2013.