Skip to content

Red Deer council selects permanent shelter site

Location not yet revealed to public
30367801_web1_211001-RDA-City-Hall6
Red Deer city council has selected a site for a permanent homeless shelter, but has not revealed the location yet. (Advocate file photo)

Red Deer city council has chosen a site for a permanent homeless shelter, although the exact location has not yet been revealed to the public.

Coming into its regular meeting on Monday, council had narrowed down its search for a shelter location to three to five sites. Following a closed session, council had identified its top location.

Red Deer Mayor Johnston said assuming the city gets the province’s approval, it will be discussed at council’s Sept. 26 meeting.

“There is certainly great optimism that we’ll be ready to make (the location) public by the 26th (of September),” said Johnston.

The discussions in Monday’s meeting were not held during the public portion of the meeting due to ongoing privacy concerns over sales and pricing matters.

The province will now have to ratify the location, Johnston said.

“We will now proceed with our provincial colleagues to bring them onside as it relates to the site we chose today – that will include our local MLAs,” he said.

“We hope that our provincial colleagues won’t take too much time to get back to us on the site. Then we can proceed to go to the public and our stakeholders, and bring the site to the public as a result of our deliberation.”

From there, city administration would work with provincial administration, Johnston added.

“Council had domain over site selection. The province will be the operator. The province will select who will run the shelter, the programming in the shelter and so on.”

Following Aug. 29’s city council meeting, Johnston said he was “confident” a shelter site decision could have been made in this week’s meeting.

Council was presented with 12 possible shelter sites in mid-August – 10 of those sites were eliminated during an in-camera meeting. Six other possible sites were later added, which brought the total to eight.

During Aug 29’s closed meeting, a technical assessment was done on each of these sites. The results were brought back to council and given further review. Council then reduced the potential sites to “three or five,” Johnston said.



sean.mcintosh@reddeeradvocate.com

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter



Sean McIntosh

About the Author: Sean McIntosh

Sean joined the Red Deer Advocate team in the summer of 2017. Originally from Ontario, he worked in a small town of 2,000 in Saskatchewan for seven months before coming to Central Alberta.
Read more