Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock MLA Maureen Kubinec is happy with the provincial government’s 2014 budget, even if there are some things she would have liked to see the area receive.
“I would love to have had more — more paved roads, more of everything,” she said on March 7, less than one day after finance minister Doug Horner tabled the budget.
“But I’m feeling pretty confident our minister did the very best he could, taking into consideration all the factors.”
Despite hankering for a bit more than the region received, Kubinec said the area would still benefit from the budget, especially when it comes to education and roads.
On the education front, although no dollar figures have been announced, both the modifications to Dapp School to accommodate an influx of students following the closure of Jarvie and W.R. Frose schools, and the new school in Neerlandia, have been given the green light. When it comes to Neerlandia, she said that project is well on track.
“I am hopeful we’ll have shovels in the ground in August or so,” she said.
Kubinec explained no dollars have been publicly attached to those projects in order to keep costs down — if projected budgets are announced, it’s unlikely any bidders will submit a cost less than what the Pembina Hills school division is forecasting the work will cost.
As for roads, the riding will be seeing $52.9 million in rehabilitation, preservation and paving done to provincial roadways — specifically primary and secondary highways.
However, Kubinec had some potential bad news for Westlock and Barrhead county councillors.
“(Highway) 661 is not on for paving to my knowledge,” she said.
It’s not for lack of trying on the part of both counties, who have been arguing for years that the highway needs to be paved, or Kubinec, who has been talking about that road with her colleagues any chance she gets.
“That is one I keep advocating for because it is a very important agricultural resource road,” she said. “In fact, it’s not even just agriculture because the Dapp power plant uses part of it as well.”
Unfortunately, she said her colleagues have their own specific projects they want to see come to fruition as well, and with only so many dollars available, choices have to be made.
When it comes to social services, Kubinec said the local Westlock-Barrhead area, as well as the wider northern Alberta region, will see a significant amount of funding.
In terms of Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) funding, she said the riding is due to receive $1.22 million this coming year.
In the wider region, which consists of the swath of land from Edmonton north to the Northwest Territories, Kubinec said social services should expect to receive a total of $343.5 million to cover child services, persons with developmental disabilities (PDD), employment and financial services and homeless support.
Of particular note is the $79.1 million in PDD funding, which comes less than a year after the province sparked an outcry amongst PDD advocates by changing how the system worked.
Across the province, PDD programming is slated to receive $967 million this year.
While Kubinec could not say whether the $79.1 in PDD funding was new money or simply the new amount organizations will receive, she did say the changes made last year do not seem to have had as negative an impact as people thought they would.
“Any time you have change and people don’t know what the change is going to look like, often they get afraid,” she said.
Since the changes were announced and digested, she said she’s spoken to representatives at the major PDD organizations — WIN in Westlock and Blue Heron in Barrhead — and been told the sky didn’t fall.
“Once the changes took place, it was OK,” Kubinec said.
That Kubinec is happy with the budget as a whole is partly a result of it including some of the ideas presented during a series of budget consultations across Alberta last year, which included a stop in Barrhead.
