Town takes over Area Structure Plan work for northeast area

The Town of High River is going to take over planning for properties along 112th Street in the northeast.

Since annexing the properties from Foothills County, development planning has been piecemeal at best according to Mayor Craig Snodgrass.

"There's different desires on the level of development that they want to go to on each of their properties," he says.

"Some want to go nuts and just develop the guts out of it and others don't want to do anything, 'leave me alone I'm good with my house and my little acreagey thing here and just leave me alone. And then there's everything in between."

He says there needs to be comprehensive planning for the area for the betterment of High River.

"We just can't start piecemealing this thing together because one or two guys want to develop and just start allowing them to put buildings anywhere on their property. At some point in time there needs to be proper servicing, water and sewer put in there. There also needs to be an access road that's been proposed in there as well," Snodgrass says. 

He says the Town has to know where the road is going to be and where the servicing is going to be, and they can't just have buildings placed wherever on the property.

"These landowners have been very aware of this since we annexed it, we said there needed to be an ASP (Area Structure Plan), they all agreed to it, the difference was who's going to do it."

"That's the decision the Town council recently made is the Town is going to take the ASP on and the Functional Servicing Report, we are going to do that and not put it in the hands of the landowners because that would create a multitude of fights and we do not want to create that so we just need to slow down and do this thing properly, it'll only take a year to get the ASP in place and then it's clear for everybody as to what the future of the area looks like and where they can develop their property."

He says the plans will be done through consultation with the landowners, so they do have a say in it.

The Town will recoup its costs by billing individual landowners for their portion of the work.