Friday, September 03, 2004
How Steve Plans on Getting his Groove Back
So, I was reading through some of my archive pages (because I'm a Big Important Person with so many important things to do), and I noticed that this blog seems to be in decline. It's been a while since I've dropped in a brilliantly witty post, it's been even longer since I've put together a really strong rant, and my posting frequency has been dismal. All of this has a way of affecting my traffic, too - August saw fewer hits than any other full month of this space's existence.
So, looking at the problem, I've come to the following conclusion: I need to spend the next two months talking about nothing but St. Albert municipal politics. I mean, what could be more enthralling than the civic governance of a city in which the vast majority of my readership doesn't even reside? Besides, if nothing else, I'm hoping that mentioning some local quasi-celebrities who may not have a lot of web mentions will get me some Googling hits.
If I'm going to make this as interesting for you as it is for me, though, you're going to need some background, which is why it is my pleasure to present this
Brief History of St. Albert's Politics
First the Earth's crust cooled, and then single-celled life appeared, and then debate began on whether or not to build a bypass around the area where the Sturgeon River (a double misnomer because it neither resembles a river nor contains Sturgeon) exits Big Lake (a double misnomer because it neither resembles a lake nor is big, at least not by the standards of things that resemble lakes).
Groundwork for the so-called "West Bypass" began in the mid-seventies, when the mayor of St. Albert was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Richard Plain, a University of Alberta health economist and a partisan Progressive Conservative (which he remains to this day, though he has been publicly critical of the Klein government on both health policy and municipal affairs). For the next twenty-five or so years, subsequent Councils vascillate and delay on the issue - piling a Royal Commission on a Royal Commission, to use the phrase of a Canadian poet whose name presently escapes me. Passions continued to run high, however - the situation is reminiscent of the "powder keg" in the Balkans, where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims teeter constantly on the brink of war over the question of whether to build a bridge over the Sturgeon River.
Fast-forward to 1998, after City Council, led by Mayor Anita Ratchinsky (who had, in 1989, succeeded popular mayor Richard Fowler after the latter had gone on to become the Progressive Conservative MLA for St. Albert) had finally decided, firmly, to take action on the road in the form of building the West Bypass. Finally, after nearly thirty years of controversy and infighting, the road was getting built.
Just kidding. At this point, a group of Concerned Citizens, led by local artist and potter Elke Blodgett and local engineer John Shaw, organized, in a matter of weeks, an anti-Bypass petition drive that managed to gather 11,000 signatures, one of them mine. Council relented, and there was a tense atmosphere as it became clear that the 1998 civic election would be a plebiscite of sorts on the bypass.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Mayoral race, where Mayor Ratchinsky was seeking a fourth consecutive term against popular alderman (and vice principal of St. Albert's largest Catholic high school) Paul Chalifoux. Ratchinsky was an unapologetic advocate for the bypass who felt that Council shouldn't have reversed itself; she hoped that the election would vindicate her stance by re-electing her as well as enough pro-Bypass aldermen to finally lay the matter to rest. Chalifoux, by contrast, was deadset against the Bypass, arguing that, while a west river crossing was needed, it didn't need to come anywhere near as close to the sensitive migratory bird populations of Big Lake as the proposed alignment did. Chalifoux won decisively (which was more than either Bob Russell, a popular alderman who challenged Ratchinsky in 1992, or Kent Davidson, a popular alderman who challegned Ratchinsky in 1995, had managed).
Things were slightly more ambiguous on the aldermanic front (St. Albert is governed by a Council consisting of a mayor and six aldermen, all elected by the electorate at large). Elected were:
Russell (a seventy-odd year old institution in St. Albert politics and former leader of the Liberal Party of Alberta. He had been on City Council continuously approximately since the beginning of time, with the exception of the three year hiatus he took after losing the Mayoral race.)
Davidson (a sometime President of the local Liberal Party constituency association, and a former alderman whose time on Council, like Russell's, had been interrupted by failed Mayoral bid)
Penny Reeves (an alderman since the 1989 election)
Margaret Plain (a long-standing alderman, later to become a member of the Capital Health Authority Board, who also happens to be married to former Mayor Richard Plain, about whom we've already heard a little and will hear much more presently)
Carol Watamaniuk (an arts advocate and long-time alderman)
Jim Starko (the owner of a St. Albert health club, and the only real newcomer to Council)
Of these, only Margaret Plain stood in overt support of the Bypass. Starko, Russell, and Reeves stood clearly against (though both Russell and Reeves had, earlier in their careers, supported the road, their minds having apparently been genuinely changed by the petition and ensuing - and concurrent - debate). Davidson and Watamaniuk made the appropriate sorts of noises about the need to re-examine the decision before making a final commitment.
This re-examination came in the form of the CityPlan commission, a collection of St. Albert residents charged with recommending a course for the future of St. Albert, of which infrastructure (including the West road) played only a part. Chaired by Matt Boiko, a political non-entity but a reasonably well-respected member of the community, it conducted public hearings, received expert submissions, and worked very hard over the course of several months. In the end, it recommended that the idea of a West Bypass be abandoned in favour of an arterial, which came to be known as Ray Gibbon Drive (after a former mayor), that would cross the Sturgeon some ways East of Big Lake. This arterial would also have run through Riel Park, a business park in St. Albert's Southwest quadrant, a fact which will become relevant later. Council, by a 5-2 vote (with Plain and Davidson as the dissenting voices) set into motion the process of building this modified road. Of course, by this time, St. Albert was about due for another election.
I have only been a resident of St. Albert for 1985, which means that I've been here for only a small part of the city's history as the longest continuously settled European settlement in Alberta, but I still feel confident in saying that the election of 2001 was probably the most heated in our history. As I advised my three or four readers in the closing a column I wrote for the St. Albert Gazette shortly before the election: "Stay tuned: this is going to be good."
In hindsight, "good" may have been a poor choice of words. Perhaps "impassioned" would have been better. At any rate, the opening volley was fired when two groups, the Riel Park Business Association and the mysterious S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice (mysterious not only because their leadership and financial backers were never revealed to the public, but also because the meaning of their apparently acronymous name remains, to this day, unknown to society at large) began to take out full-page ads in the Gazette attacking the Ray Gibbon alignment and advocating a reversion to the Bypass (these ads, which showed an inaccurate map of Ray Gibbon Drive and incorrectly stated that it would be open to truck traffic, were later declared by Advertising Standards Canada to be "false and misleading"). A side note, which is probably more interesting than relevant: S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice was fronted by Dawne Fowler, a PR professional who is married to none other than former Mayor and MLA Dick Fowler, who we met a few paragraphs back.
Anyway, with the battleground thus laid (The RPBA and S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice vs. the City Council and, to an extent, the Big Lake Environmental Support Society - a Society which had been designated by the Alberta Government as steward of the Big Lake area), the election campaign kicked off. While St. Albert does not conduct its municipal politics partisanly, the pro- anti-bypass forces were aligned into as close a thing to parties as had been seen in St. Albert's history. The candidates were:
Mayor
Paul Chalifoux - seeking a second consecutive term. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Richard Plain - remember him? Former mayor, health economist, etc.? Pro-Bypass.
John Shaw - co-organizer of the 11,000 name petition of several paragraphs back. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Alderman
Matt Boiko - chair of CityPlan Committee. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Len Bracko - Alderman from 1986 to 1989, and Liberal MLA for the riding of St. Albert from 1993 (when, for those of you keeping score at home, he defeated incumbent Conservative and former Mayor Dick Fowler) to 1997 (when he was himself defeated, by Conservative Mary O'Neill, who plays no further role in our drama). Pro-Ray Gibbon.
James Burrows - financial manager, and defeated aldermanic candidate in 1998. Pro-West Bypass.
Bob Coulter - chair of the City's Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. Pro-West Bypass.
Larry Dick - High School English teacher, and resident of Deer Ridge, a Northern subdivision that would benefit greatly from the construction of the West Bypass. "Hours of research" nevertheless led him to reluctantly conclude the Ray Gibbon Drive was the better alignment. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Kerry Kinseshanko - Former teacher, and new resident of St. Albert. Pro-West Bypass.
Al Henry - neighbour of mine, advocating neither the Bypass nor Ray Gibbon, but rather an Eastern Bypass.
Neil Korotash - 21 year old student. Pro-West Bypass.
Lynda Moffat - business owner and former President of the Chamber of Commerce. Noteworthy for running under what was perhaps the most insipid slogan in the history of St. Albert politics, "Moffat Means It". Pro-West Bypass.
Penny Reeves - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Doug Ritzen - partner in local law firm, and prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce. Pro-West Bypass.
Bob Russell - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
John Smith - Resident of the Heritage Lakes subdivision who was pissed off about the level of development going on in his neighbourhood. He declared his candidacy early, and then neglected to show up to forums or put up signs. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Jim Starko - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Curtis Stewart - accountant, used to work for Report Newsmagazine. Pro-West Bypass.
It's important to note (for reasons that will become apparent later on) at this point that not a single candidate came out explicitly in favour of the Bypass - all of them favoured either a plebiscite on the issue or the striking of some sort of commission for further study, while acknowledging that in their opinion the West Bypass was the best option thus far presented.
Anyway, the tension reached a head during the final two weeks before the election, at which time S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice, in their false and misleading newspaper ads (which had not yet been designated as such), began to include endorsements of Plain, Burrows, Korotash, Moffat, Ritzen, and Stewart. Allegations that the group and its anonymous backers had essentially "bought" the election became more impassioned when the results came in, revealing that these five, along with Bracko, were going to make up the new Council (my own votes, for those who were wondering, went to Shaw, Boiko, Bracko, Dick, Henry, Russell, Starko, with Reeves and Coulter narrowly missing the cut).
Roughly a month after the election, the new Council, by a vote of 4-2, decided to proceed with the west road without benefit of either a plebiscite or further study. The dissenting votes belonged to Plain and Korotash, who advocated the plebiscite on which they had been elected. Bracko, for his part, was out of the country. Ironically, the claims made by the four alderman voting on the prevailing side included that the election had essentially functioned as a plebiscite, the same argument that proponents of Ray Gibbon had been making about the 1998 election. The hypocrisy was palpable (whatever that means).
Many residents - on both sides of the debate - viewed this as a betrayal (as did the Saint City News, which set the stage for a newspaper war between it and the Gazette, whose editorial policy had, for many years, been resolutely pro-Bypass). It also prompted me to write what probably remains my most venom-filled Gazette Editorial of all time, in which I took the perspective of a teacher trying to teach "Democracy 101" to the four alderman who had voted in favour (it included the line "What's that, Mr. Ritzen? No, you're right, campaign promises aren't legally binding", a line which Ritzen never actually uttered, but which was attributed to him in subsequent letters to the editor by both Boiko and Starko - my attempt to issue a clarification in a subsequent column was edited out by the Gazette for reasons that remain unclear to me).
BLESS, around this time, began to take a much more aggressive approach to its opposition to the road, which eventually led Plain to suggest to the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency that the group should, by reason of its political activities, lose its charitable status (a claim that was found baseless by CCRA, since virtually none of BLESS's budget was spent on these activities). This newfound radicalism probably had something to do with the addition of Bob Russell to the BLESS executive.
Not long after this key vote, Plain, Korotash, and Bracko all dropped their resistances to moving forward, and all subsequent road-related votes were unanimous. The road cleared one of its final hurdles in August of 2004, when the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans cleared it as having an acceptably small environmental impact. Moffat, who had by this time declared her candidacy for Mayor, blamed the delays in this approval (and the accompanying costs to the city), on BLESS.
In addition to Moffat, Plain and Chalifoux have also each announced that they would like to serve as Mayor again, setting the stage for a rematch of the bitter 2001 campaign, except that this time Chalifoux has decided that he will support the West Road. For alderman, Russell has announced that he will run again, as will fellow road opponent and activist Frances Badrock. On the side of the Bypass, Burrows, Bracko, and Korotash are all seeking re-election, Kineshanko is making another attempt, and newcomers Nolan Crouse (a former general manager of the St. Albert Merchants and coach of the Fort Saskatchewan Traders hockey teams), and Michael Cooper (a pompous 20 year old twit whose primary claims to fame include being elected to the Canadian Alliance National Executive at the age of eighteen and serving as co-chair of Stockwell Day's failed leadership retention campaign in Alberta). Stewart will not run for re-election, as he is likely to be busy with being the CEO of the newly-launched Official CFL Magazine, and speculation is that Ritzen will also not be. Rumour has it that Boiko will also be making another attempt.
This about covers the recent history of St. Albert as seen through the prism of The Road. Subsequent posts will provide background on other issues, such as the construction of a multi-purpose recreation centre, the stormy relations between St. Albert and the neighbouring Sturgeon County, the smoking bylaw, and the loss of the AJHL St. Albert Saints to Spruce Grove.
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So, I was reading through some of my archive pages (because I'm a Big Important Person with so many important things to do), and I noticed that this blog seems to be in decline. It's been a while since I've dropped in a brilliantly witty post, it's been even longer since I've put together a really strong rant, and my posting frequency has been dismal. All of this has a way of affecting my traffic, too - August saw fewer hits than any other full month of this space's existence.
So, looking at the problem, I've come to the following conclusion: I need to spend the next two months talking about nothing but St. Albert municipal politics. I mean, what could be more enthralling than the civic governance of a city in which the vast majority of my readership doesn't even reside? Besides, if nothing else, I'm hoping that mentioning some local quasi-celebrities who may not have a lot of web mentions will get me some Googling hits.
If I'm going to make this as interesting for you as it is for me, though, you're going to need some background, which is why it is my pleasure to present this
Brief History of St. Albert's Politics
First the Earth's crust cooled, and then single-celled life appeared, and then debate began on whether or not to build a bypass around the area where the Sturgeon River (a double misnomer because it neither resembles a river nor contains Sturgeon) exits Big Lake (a double misnomer because it neither resembles a lake nor is big, at least not by the standards of things that resemble lakes).
Groundwork for the so-called "West Bypass" began in the mid-seventies, when the mayor of St. Albert was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Richard Plain, a University of Alberta health economist and a partisan Progressive Conservative (which he remains to this day, though he has been publicly critical of the Klein government on both health policy and municipal affairs). For the next twenty-five or so years, subsequent Councils vascillate and delay on the issue - piling a Royal Commission on a Royal Commission, to use the phrase of a Canadian poet whose name presently escapes me. Passions continued to run high, however - the situation is reminiscent of the "powder keg" in the Balkans, where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims teeter constantly on the brink of war over the question of whether to build a bridge over the Sturgeon River.
Fast-forward to 1998, after City Council, led by Mayor Anita Ratchinsky (who had, in 1989, succeeded popular mayor Richard Fowler after the latter had gone on to become the Progressive Conservative MLA for St. Albert) had finally decided, firmly, to take action on the road in the form of building the West Bypass. Finally, after nearly thirty years of controversy and infighting, the road was getting built.
Just kidding. At this point, a group of Concerned Citizens, led by local artist and potter Elke Blodgett and local engineer John Shaw, organized, in a matter of weeks, an anti-Bypass petition drive that managed to gather 11,000 signatures, one of them mine. Council relented, and there was a tense atmosphere as it became clear that the 1998 civic election would be a plebiscite of sorts on the bypass.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Mayoral race, where Mayor Ratchinsky was seeking a fourth consecutive term against popular alderman (and vice principal of St. Albert's largest Catholic high school) Paul Chalifoux. Ratchinsky was an unapologetic advocate for the bypass who felt that Council shouldn't have reversed itself; she hoped that the election would vindicate her stance by re-electing her as well as enough pro-Bypass aldermen to finally lay the matter to rest. Chalifoux, by contrast, was deadset against the Bypass, arguing that, while a west river crossing was needed, it didn't need to come anywhere near as close to the sensitive migratory bird populations of Big Lake as the proposed alignment did. Chalifoux won decisively (which was more than either Bob Russell, a popular alderman who challenged Ratchinsky in 1992, or Kent Davidson, a popular alderman who challegned Ratchinsky in 1995, had managed).
Things were slightly more ambiguous on the aldermanic front (St. Albert is governed by a Council consisting of a mayor and six aldermen, all elected by the electorate at large). Elected were:
Russell (a seventy-odd year old institution in St. Albert politics and former leader of the Liberal Party of Alberta. He had been on City Council continuously approximately since the beginning of time, with the exception of the three year hiatus he took after losing the Mayoral race.)
Davidson (a sometime President of the local Liberal Party constituency association, and a former alderman whose time on Council, like Russell's, had been interrupted by failed Mayoral bid)
Penny Reeves (an alderman since the 1989 election)
Margaret Plain (a long-standing alderman, later to become a member of the Capital Health Authority Board, who also happens to be married to former Mayor Richard Plain, about whom we've already heard a little and will hear much more presently)
Carol Watamaniuk (an arts advocate and long-time alderman)
Jim Starko (the owner of a St. Albert health club, and the only real newcomer to Council)
Of these, only Margaret Plain stood in overt support of the Bypass. Starko, Russell, and Reeves stood clearly against (though both Russell and Reeves had, earlier in their careers, supported the road, their minds having apparently been genuinely changed by the petition and ensuing - and concurrent - debate). Davidson and Watamaniuk made the appropriate sorts of noises about the need to re-examine the decision before making a final commitment.
This re-examination came in the form of the CityPlan commission, a collection of St. Albert residents charged with recommending a course for the future of St. Albert, of which infrastructure (including the West road) played only a part. Chaired by Matt Boiko, a political non-entity but a reasonably well-respected member of the community, it conducted public hearings, received expert submissions, and worked very hard over the course of several months. In the end, it recommended that the idea of a West Bypass be abandoned in favour of an arterial, which came to be known as Ray Gibbon Drive (after a former mayor), that would cross the Sturgeon some ways East of Big Lake. This arterial would also have run through Riel Park, a business park in St. Albert's Southwest quadrant, a fact which will become relevant later. Council, by a 5-2 vote (with Plain and Davidson as the dissenting voices) set into motion the process of building this modified road. Of course, by this time, St. Albert was about due for another election.
I have only been a resident of St. Albert for 1985, which means that I've been here for only a small part of the city's history as the longest continuously settled European settlement in Alberta, but I still feel confident in saying that the election of 2001 was probably the most heated in our history. As I advised my three or four readers in the closing a column I wrote for the St. Albert Gazette shortly before the election: "Stay tuned: this is going to be good."
In hindsight, "good" may have been a poor choice of words. Perhaps "impassioned" would have been better. At any rate, the opening volley was fired when two groups, the Riel Park Business Association and the mysterious S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice (mysterious not only because their leadership and financial backers were never revealed to the public, but also because the meaning of their apparently acronymous name remains, to this day, unknown to society at large) began to take out full-page ads in the Gazette attacking the Ray Gibbon alignment and advocating a reversion to the Bypass (these ads, which showed an inaccurate map of Ray Gibbon Drive and incorrectly stated that it would be open to truck traffic, were later declared by Advertising Standards Canada to be "false and misleading"). A side note, which is probably more interesting than relevant: S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice was fronted by Dawne Fowler, a PR professional who is married to none other than former Mayor and MLA Dick Fowler, who we met a few paragraphs back.
Anyway, with the battleground thus laid (The RPBA and S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice vs. the City Council and, to an extent, the Big Lake Environmental Support Society - a Society which had been designated by the Alberta Government as steward of the Big Lake area), the election campaign kicked off. While St. Albert does not conduct its municipal politics partisanly, the pro- anti-bypass forces were aligned into as close a thing to parties as had been seen in St. Albert's history. The candidates were:
Mayor
Paul Chalifoux - seeking a second consecutive term. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Richard Plain - remember him? Former mayor, health economist, etc.? Pro-Bypass.
John Shaw - co-organizer of the 11,000 name petition of several paragraphs back. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Alderman
Matt Boiko - chair of CityPlan Committee. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Len Bracko - Alderman from 1986 to 1989, and Liberal MLA for the riding of St. Albert from 1993 (when, for those of you keeping score at home, he defeated incumbent Conservative and former Mayor Dick Fowler) to 1997 (when he was himself defeated, by Conservative Mary O'Neill, who plays no further role in our drama). Pro-Ray Gibbon.
James Burrows - financial manager, and defeated aldermanic candidate in 1998. Pro-West Bypass.
Bob Coulter - chair of the City's Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. Pro-West Bypass.
Larry Dick - High School English teacher, and resident of Deer Ridge, a Northern subdivision that would benefit greatly from the construction of the West Bypass. "Hours of research" nevertheless led him to reluctantly conclude the Ray Gibbon Drive was the better alignment. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Kerry Kinseshanko - Former teacher, and new resident of St. Albert. Pro-West Bypass.
Al Henry - neighbour of mine, advocating neither the Bypass nor Ray Gibbon, but rather an Eastern Bypass.
Neil Korotash - 21 year old student. Pro-West Bypass.
Lynda Moffat - business owner and former President of the Chamber of Commerce. Noteworthy for running under what was perhaps the most insipid slogan in the history of St. Albert politics, "Moffat Means It". Pro-West Bypass.
Penny Reeves - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Doug Ritzen - partner in local law firm, and prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce. Pro-West Bypass.
Bob Russell - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
John Smith - Resident of the Heritage Lakes subdivision who was pissed off about the level of development going on in his neighbourhood. He declared his candidacy early, and then neglected to show up to forums or put up signs. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Jim Starko - incumbent Alderman. Pro-Ray Gibbon.
Curtis Stewart - accountant, used to work for Report Newsmagazine. Pro-West Bypass.
It's important to note (for reasons that will become apparent later on) at this point that not a single candidate came out explicitly in favour of the Bypass - all of them favoured either a plebiscite on the issue or the striking of some sort of commission for further study, while acknowledging that in their opinion the West Bypass was the best option thus far presented.
Anyway, the tension reached a head during the final two weeks before the election, at which time S.E.N.S.I.B.L.E. Choice, in their false and misleading newspaper ads (which had not yet been designated as such), began to include endorsements of Plain, Burrows, Korotash, Moffat, Ritzen, and Stewart. Allegations that the group and its anonymous backers had essentially "bought" the election became more impassioned when the results came in, revealing that these five, along with Bracko, were going to make up the new Council (my own votes, for those who were wondering, went to Shaw, Boiko, Bracko, Dick, Henry, Russell, Starko, with Reeves and Coulter narrowly missing the cut).
Roughly a month after the election, the new Council, by a vote of 4-2, decided to proceed with the west road without benefit of either a plebiscite or further study. The dissenting votes belonged to Plain and Korotash, who advocated the plebiscite on which they had been elected. Bracko, for his part, was out of the country. Ironically, the claims made by the four alderman voting on the prevailing side included that the election had essentially functioned as a plebiscite, the same argument that proponents of Ray Gibbon had been making about the 1998 election. The hypocrisy was palpable (whatever that means).
Many residents - on both sides of the debate - viewed this as a betrayal (as did the Saint City News, which set the stage for a newspaper war between it and the Gazette, whose editorial policy had, for many years, been resolutely pro-Bypass). It also prompted me to write what probably remains my most venom-filled Gazette Editorial of all time, in which I took the perspective of a teacher trying to teach "Democracy 101" to the four alderman who had voted in favour (it included the line "What's that, Mr. Ritzen? No, you're right, campaign promises aren't legally binding", a line which Ritzen never actually uttered, but which was attributed to him in subsequent letters to the editor by both Boiko and Starko - my attempt to issue a clarification in a subsequent column was edited out by the Gazette for reasons that remain unclear to me).
BLESS, around this time, began to take a much more aggressive approach to its opposition to the road, which eventually led Plain to suggest to the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency that the group should, by reason of its political activities, lose its charitable status (a claim that was found baseless by CCRA, since virtually none of BLESS's budget was spent on these activities). This newfound radicalism probably had something to do with the addition of Bob Russell to the BLESS executive.
Not long after this key vote, Plain, Korotash, and Bracko all dropped their resistances to moving forward, and all subsequent road-related votes were unanimous. The road cleared one of its final hurdles in August of 2004, when the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans cleared it as having an acceptably small environmental impact. Moffat, who had by this time declared her candidacy for Mayor, blamed the delays in this approval (and the accompanying costs to the city), on BLESS.
In addition to Moffat, Plain and Chalifoux have also each announced that they would like to serve as Mayor again, setting the stage for a rematch of the bitter 2001 campaign, except that this time Chalifoux has decided that he will support the West Road. For alderman, Russell has announced that he will run again, as will fellow road opponent and activist Frances Badrock. On the side of the Bypass, Burrows, Bracko, and Korotash are all seeking re-election, Kineshanko is making another attempt, and newcomers Nolan Crouse (a former general manager of the St. Albert Merchants and coach of the Fort Saskatchewan Traders hockey teams), and Michael Cooper (a pompous 20 year old twit whose primary claims to fame include being elected to the Canadian Alliance National Executive at the age of eighteen and serving as co-chair of Stockwell Day's failed leadership retention campaign in Alberta). Stewart will not run for re-election, as he is likely to be busy with being the CEO of the newly-launched Official CFL Magazine, and speculation is that Ritzen will also not be. Rumour has it that Boiko will also be making another attempt.
This about covers the recent history of St. Albert as seen through the prism of The Road. Subsequent posts will provide background on other issues, such as the construction of a multi-purpose recreation centre, the stormy relations between St. Albert and the neighbouring Sturgeon County, the smoking bylaw, and the loss of the AJHL St. Albert Saints to Spruce Grove.
