Quote:
Originally Posted by RyeJay
Why did Fort McMurray pay for such a fast process? Were they desperate? Was the amount not 'huge' for their purse? Did they want completion since they are booming and they want to avoid a municipal mess?
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My understanding is that with the change in the Regional Manager, he saw the downtown core of the town as the priority and so was able to secure from their regional council $ to hire consultants to down the downtown plan and do a downtown bylaw. But it wasn't cheap...(I've heard somewhere on the order of about 5-10 million in consulting fees, staff time (overtime due to public engagement), etc.) but don't quote that as accurate.
It comes back to the age old triangle: time, money and quality. He wanted it quick - which cost a lot, but the question becomes the quality of the job. I know we used to update the bylaw a few times a year and it took us months to do each one of those! I had a quick look at some of the bylaw and already I found a couple spelling errors...
The issue though that remains from when I worked there is: If you are going to build towers (something like trillium or bigger) where are you going to house the workers? There was a provision to allow work camps in the townsite on certain size lots; but I think that was removed (we only ever did one that I recall anyway). So housing your workers was always the big stumbling block - not like HRM where the works are all locals. So unless someone is going to buy a hotel (which I know some of the oil companies did - they bought old run down hotels and reno'd them for workers) - how do workers get there?
Just to give you a perspective - when I worked in the RM; we had 6 different proposals for towers come forward (this is prior to the work they've done on the Lower Townsite to encourage inward growth). None of the proposals has ever been built, mainly because of the worker situation.