Red Deer city council hopes to see a more diversified economy develop as the City of Red Deer’s Strategic Direction gets underway from 2012 to 2014.
Council approved the final draft of the Strategic Direction on Monday, one month after approving it in principle.
It looks at six themes — identifying and promoting Red Deer’s identity; enhancing and promoting a safe community; engaging the community and enhancing relationships; designing for and facilitating integrated movement; designing and planning a community reflecting desired character and values; and shifting primary economic development focus and activity to within Red Deer.
The document suggests diversifying and stabilizing the economy, as well as increasing local business and job opportunities.
“The purpose of the Strategic Direction is to support a healthy, vibrant and sustainable community,” said Mayor Morris Flewwelling.
He said the city hopes to do this through a series of compelling goals that unleash innovation, foster creativity, and invite participation.
The strategic direction document focuses on a vision for the community, based on council’s understanding of its needs, emerging issues and the current situation.
Flewwelling, along with eight councillors, developed the document with the help of administration.
Administration will respond by showing how the municipality can deliver upon council’s direction. This future step will become known as strategic implementation. It consists of elements such as charters for each theme area, projects, policy, work plans and budgets.
Council will have say on how and what projects will be done.
Councillors Chris Stephan and Buck Buchanan voted against the document.
“I think there’s a lot of good things in it,” Stephan said later. “But I don’t think it’s doing what I think we need to do to be sustainable in the long term. Instead of doing everything in mediocrity, we need to focus on the things that the public wants us to do and do them well.”
And that may mean cutting areas as well, Stephan said.
“We really need to look at reducing our costs,” he said. “We have a lot of debt as a city.”
Buchanan said he’s not opposed to the document overall, but with some of the wording including “decreased drug trafficking” that’s mentioned under the category of safety. If there’s a drug problem in the community, it becomes a federal mandate, not a municipal one, he said.
Coun. Paul Harris, who along with Coun. Cindy Jefferies led the Strategic Direction on behalf of council, said this plan is about the municipality being sustainable so it doesn’t have to give out huge tax increases.
“The main thrust of that is to look at everything from a more holistic viewpoint,” he said.
Harris said this document is not about money spending.
Community design standards will look at how to design new neighbourhoods more efficiently and that could entail using less money, he added.
“How do we start building things so that the communities bring in enough taxes to support themselves, so that the rest of the communities aren’t supporting them?” Harris said.
He said the city may look at whether roads need to be built so wide because if they can be built narrower, that means savings when it comes to snow plowing them.
“There’s a number of strategies in the document that talk about the financial impact on the taxpayer, if we do this properly,” Harris said. “We have to look at things differently. We can’t keep building things the way we’ve done in the past.”
In other council news:
l new Corporate Services director John Knoch attended his first public council meeting.
ltester@www.reddeeradvocate.com