Sign up for the paNOW newsletter

City’s new plan includes business and population growth

Jun 18, 2014 | 6:39 AM

Prince Albert is moving its economic development plan along, and the city is setting its sights on growth, both commercially and in terms of the size of its population.

In a strategic planning session with consultant Christopher Doll, city officials covered what Mayor Greg Dionne described as a broad range of topics. Dionne asked other attendees what they see the city looking like in 2025.

The city is now looking at drawing up development plans that would include a population of 50,000 people.

“What it was about is design a city so if you need a road here, that you’re going to do it in advance of putting a subdivision in, so then you don’t have problems once a subdivision is in, [and] where to put the major arterials in,” Dionne said.

He said the city is also conducting a study on its water and sewer infrastructure to look at where it should grow – be it more in the western or eastern regions or southward.

“And, so it’s just an overall let’s get our ducks in a line so we know which way we can expand and make sure we have [an] adequate amount of land to do that expansion,” he said.

The population of Prince Albert currently stands at a little more than 35,000 according to the last census compiled by Statistics Canada. But Dionne consults health card registration numbers for the city, which appears to indicate Prince Albert has a population of about 40,000.

An annexation of rural municipality lands to assist with that expansion isn’t on the agenda at this point, according to Dionne. The city annexed 330 acres of land from the Rural Municipality (RM) of Prince Albert south of Marquis Road only a few years ago.

The mayor said they are just looking at all of their options at this point.

The growth plan will include provisions for more multi-use residential properties and more park space. But the next step in this plan is to loop in the local school divisions.

“It’s important that, you know, we have a plan that now, before we finalize the design, we’ll meet with all our partners, especially the two school boards to say, OK, we’re going to go this direction and this will be 1,400 new homes, you know, growth in the population of 3,000, we’ll say, and well we may have to put land aside too for a new elementary school,” he said.

The target of a population of 50,000 by 2025 is admittedly an “aggressive” target, but Dionne said that if you don’t have a goal to work towards, you don’t work as hard.

And where growth of the city is concerned, the capacity of the Diefenbaker Bridge is a concern for the mayor.

He said they are working on both bridge plans and economic development plans and will shortly pitch their new bridge.

In the meeting, city officials also looked at ways to improve the City’s customer service and ways to cut costs.

To that end, Dionne said the City will look at teaming up with five or six other communities to purchase natural gas together. “And if we do that, we can probably save a couple hundred thousand [dollars]. So the things that we are looking at can give us big savings.”

But it’s not just the physical growth of the city that is on officials’ radar in this planning stage. The plans include business growth.

Dionne said there are projects that are currently under negotiation. The upcoming deals include development, commercial and recreation projects.

While new businesses will be coming to Prince Albert, Dionne indicated that encouraging the growth of existing businesses should not be discounted. He offered up the recent example of Lakeland Ford’s expansion, which will include the creation of new jobs.

“So, lots of times you can get your growth within by encouraging the businesses that are here to expand and to see the opportunities. So just not sometimes looking outside,” he said.

As for when these new deals will be announced, Dionne they’ll make the announcements once the deals have been signed and have cleared council.

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames