It's not a bylaw to say what residents can't do on environmentally-sensitive lands — it's about giving them the opportunity to do more, say municipal officials currently promoting the latest draft of Lac La Biche County's Environmental Reserve Bylaw.
Just the mention of a bylaw to govern environmental reserves can create a wave of concern, say municipal officials who have been trying to implement a resident-friendly version of the bylaw since 2018. While much of the response has been heated, officials say it has also been misplaced.
"The big misconception is that this bylaw is restricting things — no, no — in fact, this is going to be allowing people to actually do certain things they couldn't before," says Lac La Biche County spokesperson Jihad Moghrabi, encouraging residents to look through the latest version of the draft bylaw that is available on the municipality's website.
He says the current draft has been made with allowances that give residents living alongside municipally-owned ER property an avenue to address encroachment issues from their property onto the municipal parcels, temporary storage and lake access. Outside of the new bylaw, there is no other governing policy that allows those provisions.
"This is something we really want to emphasize — that this is about the rights that people didn't enjoy before, but under the new bylaw, they can — under certain conditions," said Moghrabi.
Getting emotional
Concerns about encroachments, lake access, boat lifts, boat house locations, trails, staircases, public use, storage buildings and a general sense that environmentally-sensitive areas shouldn't have so much municipal involvement have been sounded by area residents throughout the environmental reserve debate. Since 2018, open houses and discussions about the management and restrictions on environmental reserves have stirred up concerns and emotions — and municipal officials understand that.
"I don't think you can engineer all of the emotions out of a think like this. What happens on your own property and on the property next door is a big issue for people. But hopefully, after some good, long discussions that have been going on for three years, and a lot of back and forth ... I'd like to think the draft bylaw will answer a lot of people's concerns," said Lac La Biche County senior administrator Dan Small. "It won't be emotion-free, but I think once people see this document, it will satisfy a lot of concerns."
Getting informed
The current information campaign began at the start of the year with 5,300 letters sent out to all municipal property owners, explaining the current public engagement portion of the draft bylaw's rollout. The letters go with a substantial media campaign to explain the issue. A municipal email account has also been created to receive feedback on the draft plan. The idea behind the current campaign is to provide the most accurate information to the most people on an issue that has raised some confusion and concerns in the past, says Lac La Biche County's planning and development officer Dianne Cloutier.
"I think some residents felt that the County was taking away their rights as land owners, rights to enjoy the environmental reserves, to pull the weeds or groom it or have their boathouses there. They felt as though an ER bylaw was restricting their rights to use the land," she said, explaining that the opposite is true. "In fact, the Municipal Government Act and the Land Use Bylaw already restricted that... down to nothing. So we are trying get a balance."
The collection of feedback on the new draft bylaw is expected to carry on for the next few weeks. Once the latest information is collected, the draft version of the bylaw will go before Lac La Biche County council for a series of approvals. Before the document becomes official, another formal public consultation process will be held.
There's a lot that has gone into the document, says Cloutier, including public feedback and the work of more than two dozen municipal staff members in just about every county department. The end result is a document that is very specific to the many unique facets of the Lac La Biche County geography and demographic, says Moghrabi.
"This isn't copy and pasted from another municipality. This is specifically tailored to ours, and includes what our residents have asked us for and what we think is important from an environmental perspective and from a tourism perspective. We are trying to take all of those different viewpoints into account," he said.
The work and detail of the new bylaw has been done as openly as possible, with as much public input as possible, says Small.
"The worst thing you can do is to make a decision that no one knows about — and that definitely is not going to be the case here," he said.
Details of the draft Environmental Bylaw can be found at www.laclabichecounty.com. Email comments about the bylaw can be sent to county officials at [email protected]. Comments can also be made by phone at 780-623-6775.
While there has been no set deadline given for the current feedback collection, municipal officials expect Lac La Biche County councillors to have the latest revision of the draft bylaw in front of them in the coming weeks. The next Lac La Biche County council meeting is January 26.
