Taking a moment to look back on the year

Chestermere and its residents have been through a lot in 2016. With the wet summer and difficult economy it would be easy to relegate this past year into the bad column when looking back.
While Chestermere Mayor Patricia Matthews acknowledges that there have been more than a few challenges, a lot of good things happened for the city in 2016 as well.
“There’s been challenges and opportunities through the entire year as there always is,” she said.
Several high-level planning documents were completed this past year including the Municipal Development Plan (MDP) which was passed by council in August.
The MDP sets out the 25-year plan for the growth of the city.
For Matthews, the implementation of the MDP stands out as one of the biggest success for the city this past year.
“We’ve got a fantastic document that…reflects family values and connectivity and environmental stewardship and all the things that Chestermerians are proud of,” she said.
The city has also implemented a new communications strategy to inform the public of what city staff and council are doing.
“We’ve been pretty productive over the last year…despite the downturn in the economy,” said Matthews.
Another success for Chestermere was the Alberta Mid-Size Cities Mayors’ Caucus which the city hosted at the end of September.
“We had the chance to showcase Chestermere, as Alberta’s newest city, to 21 other communities,” said Matthews.
Amongst the guest at the conference included a member of the Senate and Ministers from the Alberta government.
The group of Mayors and Chief Administrative Officers worked and learned together about some of the things impacting mid-sized cities in Alberta.
“We did some great lobbying to draw attention to the concerns we have together as a group,” said Matthews.
The conference also had the benefit of helping boost the city’s economy.
“People came early, stayed late,” she said, “stayed in the hotel, went to the restaurants played on the lake.”
Both the caucus and the MDP plan, although important to the future of Chestermere, may not have been noticed in the day-to-day lives of the residents.
The biggest challenges that city staff and council faced in 2016 was the Conrich Area Structure Plan appeal before the Municipal Government board and the review of Chestermere Utilities Inc. (CUI).
Matthews describes Rocky View County’s proposed Area Structure Plan for Conrich as unsustainable.
“We will always put Chestermere priorities first.
We’ll work well with our neighbours we want to be collaborative we want to make sure we’re doing good regional planning but Chestermere is always our priority,” she said.
The city and county were unable to negotiate a resolution to the conflict so an appeal before the Municipal Government Board was started.
The appeal process ended on Sept. 23 and the city and county are now waiting on the board’s decision.
“Now we wait for the outcome of that and hopefully it is positive…not only for Chestermere but for the region,” said Matthews.
City staff spent a lot of time working on their presentations to the board.
“I’m really proud of the team that was involved in that for being professional and prepared,” she said.
The other major challenge of the year was the CUI review.
“It was a very challenging year when it came to learnings around CUI,” said Matthews, “but we believe that we’ve worked through a very intensive process.”
A third-party review has been completed on the CUI and council passed the recommended actions which included a new mandate for CUI and the development of a new rate setting process.
“We’re happy to see an expert board now put in place,” said Matthews.
“We’ll continue to hone the process of rate setting so that it further aligns with industry standards for next year’s application,” she said.
The other perpetual challenge is managing the city budget.
“How do we be fiscally responsible and still provide people with good quality service and be mindful of the impact that our budget has on households,” said Matthews.
Unlike the governance highs and lows which community members may not have been aware of, Matthews believes that most of the community will have noticed the new Winter Lights Festival at the end of November which replaced the annual January Winter Fest.
“This year we took a bit of a leap with one of our events,” she said. “and revised it changed it up and brought it out as our Winter Lights Festival.”
Events like these are where they get the most feedback from the community said Matthews who has received enormous amounts of feedback on the new festival.
She said that people stopped her when she was grocery shopping to tell her how much they enjoyed the festival.
Residents told her they really enjoyed being out by the lake with the high school band playing.
The festival was well attended with people enjoying the new light displays, the fire pits, food trucks and activities.
“It was a feel-good moment for a huge number of people within our community,” said Matthews.
As this was the debut of the lights festival, city staff were unsure how the community would receive it.
“It was really pleasant to see it,” said Matthews.
Another new event that what as a huge success was Lemonade Day.
“That was our first ever attempt at supporting young entrepreneurship,” she said, “and it went off with a bang.”
About 100 kids participated setting up 50 lemonade stands for the event.
“It was phenomenal,” said Matthews.
“Those kids stepped up and really came up with some really, really creative ideas on how to bring forward a lemonade stand,” she said.
The low point for events in Chestermere came with the decision to cancel the annual Water Festival.
The festival attracts thousands of people to the city.
“[It was] the first time ever we had to cancel water festival,” said Matthews.
“It was heartbreaking,” she said.
Water Festival was cancelled due to the inclement weather and forecast thunderstorms for the festival day.
“We had to do it for safety concerns,” said Matthews.
Staff have been reviewing what happened so that contingency plans can be made for the future should conditions like this happen again.
As 2016 ends, Matthews said that her goals for the new year are to get Chestermere into the best position possible to take advantage of the economy when it picks up again.
“Just because there’s not a huge amount of growth going on doesn’t mean there isn’t an awful lot of planning being done in this building,” she said.
This preparedness will let the city identify and take advantage of cost savings in the future development of Chestermere.
“We want to be able to get the light industrial/commercial land that we’ve got in place…marketed to potential investors,” said Matthews.
This marketing is a longer term goal but Matthews hopes that the economy start to grow in the new year.
“I certainly hope that Alberta in general sits in a better economic position in 2017,” said Matthews.