Westlock County played host to seven surrounding counties last week in a meeting to discuss interregional collaboration and shared financial opportunities.
Representatives from Athabasca, Barrhead, Lac Ste. Anne, Thorhild, Sturgeon, Lesser Slave River, Woodlands County and Westlock County were all on hand at the Westlock and District Community Hall Feb. 25 to find ways they can work together to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
County reeve Bud Massey explained that the meeting was designed to help the counties find collaborative solutions to combat forecasted reductions in provincial and federal funding.
“As you are more than aware, a few rough patches on the horizon, and budgetary dollars are going to become scarcer,” Massey said.
Woodlands county mayor Jim Rennie agreed with Massey and added that staying ahead of government mandates for collaboration would help streamline the process and prepare them for the inevitable.
“With the province pitching regional collaboration, what better way to be proactive and start it before the province mandates it,” Rennie said.
Rennie also said that forward thinking plans around resource sharing, whether mandated or not, would help the bottom line, both for counties and taxpayers.
“It’s a chance to figure out what our neighbours have and need… We can go from there and figure out what would be the best way, down the road, to share taxpayer dollars and resources.
“Community leaders here have heard a lot of things that we thought, ‘Hey we could do this a little better.’”
Though the meeting’s agenda was purposefully broad to promote creative thought, they still managed to focus on key topics, such as infrastructure and recreation.
“Infrastructure is likely the largest area of contention in most municipalities,” Massey said. “We have too few dollars and too many roads and too many bridges. How can we cut down engineering costs? How can we cut down legal costs? How can we consult more?”
Barrhead reeve Bill Lee agreed, saying that strategies, such as bulk fuel purchases, could go a long way to save money on infrastructure repairs and maintenance.
“Together we buy in big chunks. Fuel for the county, especially in the summertime when we’re doing road construction and road maintenance, we go through quite a bit,” Lee said.
Each and every county, Lee explained, would be able to bring its own area of expertise to the table and help others find efficiencies.
Lee pointed to Barrhead’s experience using recreational areas to mitigate illegal use of firearms and off-highway vehicles as an area of expertise other counties might benefit from.
“When it comes to off-road vehicles, we do have a private company with around 640 acres designated to trails and roads,” Lee said.
“We also have a gun range out here in the county for people who want to use firearms.
“Some of these other municipalities are running into problems because these guys have OHVs running around on Crown land to go out and shoot their rifles. For us that isn’t a big problem because we have [those resources].”
Hopefully, Lee said, they can learn from experience with mutual-aid agreements on things like fire services to help coordinate resource sharing in less obvious areas.
“Residents of this area are actually quite lucky at how well we do share information and get along,” Lee said.
“It does save our taxpayers substantially more money than if we just went alone and stumbled through things.”
