Growth management study to go to council for review

Posted on: Staff Writer

Shannon LeClair
Times Reporter
 
The third and final open house for the Wheatland County Regional Growth Management Study, RGMS, took place on March 9, with Jagdev Shahi from Dillon Consulting making the presentation. Dillon Consulting has been working with the county to develop the RGMS as a tool to help guide future development within the county. Reeve of Wheatland County Ben Armstrong was available for comments on what the RGMS means to council. 
“It’s a tool, it’s a study and it’s telling…where things can happen, where the growth is, where the pressures are and some suggestions on how to handle that pressure,” said Armstrong.
The county will now take the information provided by the study and will look into the Municipal Development Plan, MDP. If any of the suggestions from the RGMS are used, they will be implemented into the MDP. The purpose of having an RGMS is to help develop a framework, which consists of a vision, regional goals and policies to outline growth locations within the county. The RGMS is outlining what they project will happen in Wheatland County over the next 40 years. While it is a guideline, it’s not something being implemented immediately into the MDP. 
“We can’t look at each development in isolation. We have to look at them as part of a whole,” said Armstrong.
“If you look at each one individually, pretty soon you don’t have one individual on there, you’ve got 300. That makes one big one, and uh oh we should have had this in place so that this didn’t happen. Usually that shouldn’t happen if you look at it as a whole.”
He said there are pressures from the bigger centres, cities, to have people move out into rural areas.  
“Every time somebody moves into an agricultural area there’s causes and effects on both sides and we like to say we are a agricultural municipality and we support agriculture. We better take a good hard look when we allow development, how it affects agriculture,” said Armstrong. 
One concern was whether a higher level of government would be able to trump the Wheatland County RGMS.