Rob Murray: Quarry Lake – a lot of discussion about improvements up there and ways to manage the volume of traffic that we’ve seen, especially this summer. What’s the latest news on that?

Mayor John Borrowman: It has been a very difficult summer for popular recreation areas like Quarry Lake. Throughout the summer, the Parks Department and Bylaw were doing a lot of things to try to address what was happening and improve the situation. We increased bylaw patrols, we put in place timed parking and there were a number of tickets issued, but it was over the top. Coincidentally, the province has come out just recently with a grant program, the Municipal Stimulus Program. The requirements for that funding are fairly stringent. One project that had been discussed but hadn’t been approved had to do with enhancements at Quarry Lake. What better time than now to do it given this summer? We won’t know until the beginning of that October whether we’ll get the grant – a little bit less than $630,000.

We’ll put in place some of the enhancements that were approved by council and by the Rocky Mountain Heritage Foundation board, the most important one is doing a lot of work on the primary parking area to make it more functional and also to make it ready for paid parking if we should decide to put paid parking in at the Quarry. As well, and this is going to be really important, we’re going to build two new vault washrooms, each with four stalls, each with wheelchair accessibility. We’ll be putting in an additional concrete platform at the south beach to allow for increased waste bins to be placed there. The final piece of the project is a jumping platform on the west bank. You know where, for eons, people have been jumping off the cliff and climbing back up the embankment. It’s becoming more and more eroded. There’ll be some sort of jumping platform there that will have stairs to allow people to get back up to the bank. If we get that approval we’ll have that work done in time for next summer.

Tanya Foubert: This is all part of the provincial stimulus fund, and one of those stringent requirements is that it can’t result in any increased operational costs or potential tax increases. That’s key, because the paid parking aspect would create revenue that would pay for whatever increased staff costs it would take to maintain those additional things like the washroom and the bins.

RM: I wanted to ask about the paid parking thing, because I remember discussions about all the things like the jumping platform and the washrooms, but when did paid parking enter the discussion here?

JB: Last month, I suppose, it became part of the discussion because of our experience this summer and the need to manage what’s happening with our costs of managing the Quarry Lake area. These were significant with additional bylaw officer patrols and work from Solid Waste getting up there and emptying bins, cleaning the washrooms, cleaning the litter as best they could.

You mentioned some of the requirements that the province put in place for this particular grant program. Honestly, in all the years I’ve been involved with municipal government, I’ve never seen any grant program with so many challenging requirements.

TF: My favorite is the one where you have to submit a report on how you’re reducing red tape for businesses in order to get the money, and if the report isn’t to the satisfaction of the minister they can take the money back. So I just want to point out, in essence, the province has created more red tape for municipalities to get grant funding by creating this red tape report.

JB: Yeah, I think that’s a fair observation.

Filed under: Canmore, Mountain Insider, Quarry Lake