Red Deer County is reassuring landowners that a plan to manage environmentally significant areas won’t interfere with people’s right to develop their property.
A workshop held last Saturday drew about 80 county residents interested in the county’s plan to inventory environmentally significant areas, such as wetlands and wildlife corridors, and develop a plan to help protect ecologically sensitive areas.
Sam Afolayan, the county’s long range planning manager, believes the full-day workshop featuring several guest speakers familiar with land-use issues, provided more clarity on the county’s intentions to landowners who attended.
There have been some misconceptions about the county’s intentions.
“It’s the general fear of landowners that this was going to be another regulatory framework that would hinder them from doing what they meant to do on their land.”
The plan is not meant to regulate what people do with their land, but to highlight various voluntary conservation methods that many of the farmers are already undertaking.
Existing zoning for land will not change under the plan, nor will the county tell farmers how they must manage their cropland, woodlands and pastures.
Afolayan said landowners responded positively when the county made it clear it was interested in hearing what people wanted the municipality to do, rather than telling ratepayers what to do.
Consultants are expected to pull together comments received at the meeting for the county by the end of the week. In January, a number of face-to-face interviews with landowners will be conducted.
That will be followed by a later round of telephone interviews with residents not reached previously.
All of the information gathered will be compiled and crafted into a set of guiding principles for directing future policies and strategies. Another workshop will follow, most likely in the late winter to run ideas by the public.
“It’s a very thorough public engagement process,” he said.
“Actually we call it a collaboration process and we are now expecting a lot more feedback from the landowners and the other stakeholders.”
An open house will then be held to show the public how the plan is shaping up. The plan will likely go to council for approval in late spring or early summer next year.
pcowley@www.reddeeradvocate.com
