High River Mayor Craig Snodgrass is running for re-election in the Oct. 18 municipal vote.

He says the town's moving forward after the 2013 flood.

"We were very successful in the amount we accomplished in the first four years and the last four years, the second term was finishing up a lot of that flood recovery work as well as primarily finishing negotiations and the actual construction of the southwest berm which was one of the final major pieces of that flood mitigation."

"That last half of the second term, of course, has been trying to manage the COVID crisis within our community and that's been very much a challenging experience for all of us and especially for anything to do with business or economic development in this town," he says.

Until the town is able to lift provincially mandated restrictions, he says the town will continue to struggle with businesses opening and closing and all the confusion that goes with the different rules and regulations.

An issue that's come up during the campaign is doing away with red tape which Snodgrass says sounds good on the surface but there's a reason for some of it.

"Nobody, if you're in the mix of something, really likes regulations but they are extremely important because what they are there for is to protect the population from getting screwed over. Now that does not mean that we don't constantly review our processes and what's going on and we identified a couple coming out of our Land Use bylaw two-year trial period and identified a couple of pieces that didn't make sense to the builders, didn't make sense for the town and didn't make sense for how these developments were developing, that was the variance requirements so council got rid of those in three separate areas."

After the flood in 2013, the town put in place a pre-application meeting because builders were showing up from all over the country with each one expecting a different set of rules but now that the town's seeing primarily local builders who understand the rules there's no longer a need for that meeting so there's consideration to it being shelved.

Snodgrass admits there were some delays in summer because staff were working from home and it's been difficult to get staff back during the pandemic something he's been hearing from a lot of business owners in the community.

"We cannot find extra staff, it's no different than the clothing store that's just down the road looking for more staff, Mike's Transmission is looking for staff to come back to work and it's no different for the Town of High River, we've got about 35 positions posted and it's dismal to get applications so it's one thing to identify these processes and deal with the problems that we see within them but one of them is having the staff compliment available to service the industry as we clearly want to."

The mayor plans to continue his work spearheading municipal opposition to coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies and has a meeting this week with a representative of the Ministry of Environment working on the coal policy.

The town's in a bit of a holding pattern awaiting the Coal Policy Committee's report, which goes to the government on Nov. 15.

"As far as I'm concerned if I'm in the mayor's chair for another term this is not one where you even remotely begin to weaken on, this primarily affects the Highwood watershed and the future of our water supply, that's priority number one and then we can get into the destruction of the eastern slopes which is unacceptable as well."

Snodgrass says it's become very clear to him there's a lot of confusion about the referendum on the swimming pool at the Rec-Plex.

"Your new council coming in will absolutely be brought up to speed on why we chose this option, it's extremely important that we take this seriously because we have to do something, in my mind I think it's unacceptable to sit around and wait for something else that we cannot afford right now, we've been through this nine ways to Sunday and that's why the referendum is showing the $15 million expansion on to the existing rec centre and the reason is anything more than that, we just can't afford it. If you going into any stand-alone building with a pool you're at a bare minimum $25 to $30 million."

Mayor Snodgrass expects the next year plus is going to spend recovering from the pandemic.

 

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