Rocky View Council (RVC) has been playing political football with gravel extraction policy for years, at one point giving up and tabling the discussion completely with no official explanation afterwards.
Their latest brainwave was to strike an Aggregate Resource Plan (ARP) Stakeholder Advisory Committee last year to come up with a plan for gravel pit development that respects residential interests and balances environmental sustainability with resource extraction and development.
The ARP committee was convened with the hopes of finding a way past the deadlock and conflict seen in the municipality over aggregate resource extraction these past number of years.
The process of developing a feasible ARP was kicked around again at the July 23 public meeting where council members differed over the speed at which they believed administration should be moving.
In the end, the two options under discussion called for staff to come back with recommendations based on the committee’s findings either by September 30 or by the end of December. Even after staff said they could easily have met the September deadline, council opted for December.
Cynics in the lobby groups opposed to the way gravel pits have been approved are up-in-arms over what they perceive to be at best unacceptable foot dragging, and at worst, a broken promise by Reeve Crystal Kissel to move the process along.
Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that what really happened at the July 23 meeting is itself a subject of debate, depending on which group you ask.
Time will tell whether RVC will have a new resource plan in place before the next election in October 2025. Given their track record it seems the smart money would bet on the odds against.
The committee did great work, but missed their original deadline by about five months. And now council has volunteered to tack on an extra three months despite those assurances from Administration, which pushes us into the spring of 2025 before hearings would likely be scheduled.
If you were a councillor considering running in the fall of 2025, what are the odds you’d favour diving into this debate next summer, in the runup to an October election?
Don’t bet on it.
