The City of Cold Lake formally rejected 21 recommendations in a provincially-ordered municipal inspection report last week, and instead took aim at the work of consultant George Cuff, the report's author.
In a June 9 letter to Municipal Affairs Minister Hector Goudreau signed by Cold Lake Mayor Craig Copeland, Cuff's $75,000 report paid for by provincial taxpayers was strongly criticized as flawed and inaccurate.
“After extensive debate council believes that the 21 recommendations are based on conflicting and/or subjective misinformation and as a result cannot support these recommendations,” Copeland said in the letter, which was released to the public and also posted on the city's website Wednesday.
Copeland said Friday that the minister had already heard informally from Cold Lake representatives at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference how disappointed they were with Cuff's work and his conclusions.
“We met the minister in Toronto at the FCM conference and we sort of expressed to him verbally our disappointment with the Cuff Report, so I don't think the minister is going to be surprised with what we said (in the letter),” Copeland said.
As of Friday, Copeland hadn't heard a response to the city's letter.
“Whether or not the minister will reply to us, that's his call,” Copeland added.
Copeland said he isn't worried about repercussions from the province for rejecting Cuff's recommendations.
“There's no substance in the report to back his recommendations,” Copeland said, calling the 206-page document “a poor piece of work.”
He added the city's now-familiar call for the province to address inequities in the tax bases among assessment-poor urban centres surrounded by rural municipalities with strong assessment bases propped up by linear and pipeline assessment.
“The government needs to address the urban communities that are struggling with the whole sustainability issue, and, please define to us what is a sustainable community…”
Cuff, an experienced municipal government and organizational consultant with decades in the field and past experience as Spruce Grove's mayor, found Cold Lake to be a sustainable community in need of a tax hike.
He also urged it to head back to the negotiating table with the MD of Bonnyville so that it could access more than $1 million annually offered by the MD under its regional community development agreement that includes the Town of Bonnyville and Village of Glendon.
To date, the MD and the city haven't started talks on the issue, and Copeland was vague about where things might be going.
“We'll start that process again. The minister has given us some feedback on that, and we're going to follow his advice and start working with the MD of Bonnyville on a Cold Lake-MD of Bonnyville agreement and see if there's the will on the part of both parties to sit down and work out a strategy that will be long lasting,” Copeland said.
He said Goudreau has given the city advice on engaging the MD, but declined to elaborate on what the minister said.
“We're going to follow the minister's advice and see where it goes.”
While Cold Lake's letter to Goudreau is critical of Cuff's work, it's more careful in addressing its difficulties with the MD, whose tax revenue it wants to share.
The letter says Cold Lake was labeled as being mismanaged prior to the municipal inspection, and that “Our regional partners took the position of exploiting this perception.”
Beyond that, the letter takes runs at Cuff and the provincial government, which the letter says “cannot absolve itself” from the inequities in urban and rural tax bases.
The MD has a higher opinion of Cuff's work in the report.
In his message to MD residents in the MD's June newsletter, Reeve Ed Rondeau wrote: “Mr. Cuff does say that the MD of Bonnyville has been more than generous in their support of neighbouring urban municipalities and that Cold Lake should sign the regional community development agreement.”
Rondeau's message goes on to say that, “According to Cuff, ‘a review of past funding contributions by the MD to city projects reveals a level of co-operation that would compare well with rural-urban neighbours throughout Alberta.'”