St. Albert Minute: Issue 121

St. Albert Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of St. Albert politics

📅 This Week In St. Albert: 📅

• The Subdivision and Development Appeal Board will meet on Wednesday at 6:00 pm to hear two appeals of refused development permits, the larger of which comes from the owners of the St. Albert Inn. Sturgeon Hotel Group wants to convert the north wing of the existing hotel into 28 rental apartment units, but the City's Development Officer refused the permit on July 8th. The refusal rested on a single point: City rules require every apartment unit to include private amenity space such as a balcony, patio, or private yard, and none of the 28 proposed units would provide any. In the appeal, the operators argue the building was designed as a hotel and cannot add balconies without structural changes that would make the project financially and practically unfeasible, and that shared indoor and outdoor amenities plus the reuse of an existing building outweigh the shortfall. General Manager Michael Mazepa contends the conversion would deliver additional long-term rental housing while making productive use of an established property. Because apartments are a discretionary use on the site, the Board has authority to overturn the refusal and approve the permit, with or without conditions.
  
  
• The same hearing on Wednesday will also take up an appeal from St. Albert homeowners who were refused a permit to build a deck with an enclosed sunroom at their home. Their design would sit 3.8 metres from the rear property line, where City rules require 6 metres, a shortfall of 2.2 metres or 36.7%. The permit was not turned down on its merits: the City's Development Officer can only approve setback variances of up to 25% on her own authority, and because this request exceeded that limit, she had no power to approve it and refused it on June 17th. The Appeal Board is not bound by the 25% ceiling and can grant the larger variance the homeowners are seeking. 
  
  
• City Council has asked Administration to study whether the City should add a Community Response Unit to its fire service, a smaller vehicle staffed by two crew members that would answer non-life-threatening medical calls instead of sending a full fire truck. Council voted unanimously on June 16th to look into the idea, which Councillor Sandy Clark brought forward after learning how many medical calls fire crews handle following Council's May decision to keep an integrated fire and EMS service. Clark said she does not envision hiring new staff, but rather exploring whether part of the existing crew could respond on a decommissioned brush truck, cutting wear and tear on expensive fire apparatus. The local firefighters union has welcomed the discussion but raised a staffing question. Local 2130 President Greg Harvey said new fire trucks can take upwards of four years to build and carry rising costs, so keeping the large trucks in reserve makes sense, but he wants to know whether the unit would add resources or simply redistribute existing firefighters as call volumes climb in a growing city.
  
  
• Sturgeon County residents, some living just outside St. Albert, are objecting to how a massive Meta data centre was approved next door with no public consultation. Premier Danielle Smith and Meta announced the roughly $13-billion facility on July 8th, to be built east of Gibbons in Alberta's Industrial Heartland as the company's first Canadian data centre. Sturgeon County approved a development permit for the project in June and has said public open houses are not required, because data processing facilities are already a permitted use under zoning the County amended in 2022 and again in 2025. Residents say they were given no chance to weigh in, and they worry about the plant's demands on water and the electricity grid. The one-gigawatt facility is approved to draw 970 megawatts from the provincial grid and would be partly powered by a separate $4.6-billion natural gas plant. Some residents fear that the added demand will push up already high electricity prices, and other residents argue a decision of this magnitude warranted meaningful consultation before approval.
  
  
• Weeks of high water on the Sturgeon River left much of St. Albert under a sulphurous, sewer-like smell in mid-July. City officials say the odour came from plants and soil along the river's flooded banks decomposing without oxygen, a process that releases hydrogen sulphide and its rotten-egg smell. The river peaked at 3.01 metres on July 4th following last month's record rainfall, higher than the floods of 2018 and 1982 though still short of 1972, and was flowing far faster than usual. The City warned the extended flooding could topple trees, tilt lampposts, and crack riverside trails, and cautioned that the City remains vulnerable to a major rainfall event. So far, the stormwater drains are still working despite being submerged, and officials expect the smell to persist until water levels fall and the shores dry out. 

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