Mountain Insider - Three Sisters ASPs / Undermining

Rob: It’s taken a while to work its way through but we finally have the Three Sisters Area Structure Plans for Smith Creek and Three Sisters Village coming before Canmore Council for first reading on February 9^th. After first reading there’s usually a public hearing, so I’m sure we’ll hear news about that and there will be an opportunity for public to directly talk to Council about this, but the documents are available right now. There are a lot of people on many sides of this discussion and a lot of people keying into the undermining conversation as well, saying we shouldn’t be developing so heavily on undermined lands, especially in the Three Sisters Village area. I know Three Sisters is doing an undermining info session on Wednesday. Is there anything to this undermining conversation? Is this a key area that Canmore Council should be looking at?

Tanya: Developing on undermined land – the concern around the risk of doing that is totally understandable. There has been a lot of mitigation done by Three Sisters, thousands of holes drilled to map the area and to understand where the risk is. Back in the 90s Canmore basically said they do not want to accept the liability and responsibility for approving development on undermined land, but what ended up happening is the provincial government then took the liability upon themselves. What that means is that Canmore Council, when considering these Area Structure Plans, cannot reject them because they’re on undermined land. They don’t have the jurisdiction because it’s a provincial responsibility. It’s a tough one because I know a lot of people are going to ask Council to say no to the Village in particular, especially the golf course area which originally had a golf course because it’s so undermined that at the time we were told they didn’t want to put development on it. Part of the thing that we have to do, as a community, is understand more about it and get as much information as possible, but when it comes to Council’s decision making, this is not a factor they’re going to be looking at.