Reader Response Forum
28/11/2009 02:12
Developers Can Suck It Up Or Leave City
Don,
Take a look at the Saint City News yesterday, as the developers are threatening no development in the annexed lands. Why? Because the City wants them to pay their fair share of the costs of infrastructure to service that development. This means they need to pay $92.5 of the $95 million that the city was originally going to require the taxpayer to pay. This was in spite of Council's promise that developers would pay the full cost of developing their lands.
This threat shows how vigilant we have to be as it will place extra pressure on Council to let the developers off the hook. A couple of the speakers at the Council meeting on Monday said "let the market work". If developers feel the costs are too high, then development can wait, take less profit, or sell and let others develop.
And please read the Gazette tomorrow, where a full page ad of SATA's presentation on off-site levies will appear. The ad was placed as one of our members (who wants to remain anonymous) felt so strongly that it should be published, that they paid for it. OUR THANKS TO THEM, this is a major donation that helps move the goals of your organization forward.
Lynda Flannery
President
St. Albert Taxpayers Association
SINC SAYS:
Lynda, we all need to give that anonymous donor who paid for the ad in the Gazette a group hug. What a wonderful thing to do.
As for those developers, they can tough it out. That’s what we taxpayers have been doing for years now. Let’s see how long they can survive without developing. Seems to me that would put them out of business by their own hand, wouldn’t it?
To be very honest, no development on the housing side might be just the thing to give us time to recuperate from the damage that has been done by this council and the administration they and other councils have allowed to tax residents to death for the past eight years.
It also might allow us some time to get out from under the crushing debt this administration has engineered and this council has “bought” from an administration gone amok.
If this council collapses and reverses their earlier decision due to threats from developers, it will be the saddest day in the history of St. Albert. Their rallying cry should be, “make the developers pay”.
A Cartoon To Make Your Day
