October 2022 Meeting Highlights

An overview of our plans for 2022/23 and a discussion on the North Saskatchewan River Heritage Designation.

It was nice to meet again with 24 partners joining us online or in person after a busy summer and fall. Many thanks to the Goldeye Centre for once again providing the space.

A few of the items we discussed are listed here and the slides from the meeting are available below.

Plans for 2022/23

The plan for the upcoming year is available here.

Some of the key items discussed include looking for a volunteer to assist with sharing the meeting highlights along with opportunities to contribute toward the itinerary development and destination training program. If you are interested in helping with any of these, please email Danielle to find out more.

The partnership structure will be changing this year to allow us to include more partners while maintaining open discussions and providing great visitor experiences. The new structure is available here.

We will be discussing winter marketing plans in more detail at the November meeting but we had a good discussion on various ways to collaborate with David Thompson Country. This includes our ability to more freely share information as a non-municipal organization.

We are also working toward presenting an update on our activities to Council at their November 22 meeting.

Commercial Garbage

Work on a garbage collection proposal continued over the summer. The details are available here and we will now be reaching out to each of the partners to confirm how many dumpsters they would like under this proposal. The plan is to present to Clearwater County Council on November 22 with the Nordegg Community Association.

Lisa Lima from Travel Alberta presenting on the Ultimate Travellers

Short-Term Rentals

Concerns in regard to the lack of short-term rental oversights were brought forward to Clearwater County a year ago. The administration reported that they are still conducting research on the models used by various municipalities in order to develop a bylaw that would then be presented to Council for approval.

Our concerns continue to remain that:

Short-term rentals should be required to have a development permit, and be taxed, the same way as any other commercial activities;
A balance must be achieved between the needs for residential housing and vacation rentals;
Short-term rentals should be required to have a local manager who can respond to neighbourhood and guest issues as they occur.

This can be addressed in a number of ways. The Land Use Bylaw would provide one of the most flexible approaches, allowing Clearwater County to develop rules specific to the resort community of Nordegg without having to develop a new framework.

North Saskatchewan River Heritage Designation

Kyle Schole from Smoky Lake County and Leif Olson from O2 Planning & Design presented on the heritage river designation process and the opportunities arising from obtaining such a designation.

This will not lead to any new restrictions for the area but provides an additional framework to share the stories of the North Saskatchewan River. We will share more information as it becomes available and in the meantime you can find out more on the Smoky Lake County website.