Steps Thorhild County took to defeat Intrusive LUBs (Land Use Bylaws)
Our recommendations to members of the public (in any municipality) for this process are below:
1) Familiarise yourself with the existing Bylaws.
2) When were they last written/ updated? Do they need updating?
3) Check out your consultant – their company name and logo will be on the front page or within the first two pages of the document. Some consultants are easy to tell if they’re a good match for your County. Some are easy to determine that they aren’t a good fit, too (like having an “Urban Planning” firm draft documents for an agricultural county). Most have a website, browse it.
4) Read your new proposed Land Use Bylaw (take a glass of wine, tea, or hot chocolate if you need to)
a) Make a list of all of the changes that concern you, or as many as you can.
b) Look for “In case of an emergency” clauses (lockdowns, climate lockdowns, and public emergencies).
5) If you aren’t happy with what you see in the proposed Bylaw, request justification for the specific changes from your Councillor and the CAO/Administration and communicate your concerns with the CAO and your Councillor.
6) Request amendments and edits to the draft before it passes the First Hearing. Read the document and be prepared before the First Hearing, which is where the councillors can ask questions about the document and put forth motions to have it adjusted before returning it to the Chambers for another attempt at a First Reading.
a) Tell your neighbours and friends. If the document is still unsatisfactory to you and passes the First Reading, speak at the Public Hearing and get your neighbours and friends to as well. (People can speak if they aren’t registered, but if you are registered to speak, then you will have a designated time to speak). Articulate the issues you/they have with the document. Having people in the community like us who monitor the activity of the Council is awesome to keep Council accountable and transparent.
7) Ask questions and demand answers.
8) Stick with the process. Watch for when Council brings the LUB to its next reading (second or third) and be there for the meeting.
Approaching the new proposed LUB, we highly recommend reading it through. Every page.
Do not forget to cross-reference the definitions of terms because those definitions can be quite restrictive without you realizing it. Look at the sections on “Enforcement,” “Non-Conforming” structures or “Non-conformity,” “Non-compliant,” and Land Use Districts that are relevant to you (though it’s good to have a sense of what is happening in all of the Land Use Zones; for example, some of our members are on farms and others are on residential properties, so we each looked at the Land Use Zone appropriate to where we live and then kept reading about the other zones). Also, search the document for language like “in the opinion of,” “to the satisfaction of,” and “deemed necessary by” the Development Authority. Every municipality uses slightly different language, so you can keyword search for (Find in page): satisfaction, opinion, and non-con (to bring up clauses that have non-conforming or non-conformity in them). Some other places to look for excessive restrictions are Signage (freedom of expression and speech), Landscaping (and other General Requirements like Fencing), and Hens (yes, chickens- check if hen enclosures need permits no matter how big or small they are, even if they’re on farms).
If the Bylaw refers you to another County Bylaw, cross-check with that Bylaw and make sure that the document exists AND is what the new proposed LUB suggests it is (for example, our proposed LUB directed the reader to the “Urban Hen Bylaw” though Council voted against Urban Hens in 2021 and there is no such document. Our proposed LUB also directed us to the Animal Control Act for how to keep animals; however, our County’s Animal Control Bylaw is specific to dogs).
We have been encouraging the residents in Thorhild County who contact us to call and/or email our Councillors and the CAO (Chief Administrative Officer). So this also applies to other counties. The key is ALSO to contact the municipality’s office of the CAO, since they also have to record input and engagement. There are no wrong or right questions to ask, but asking questions instead of making statements is a good tactic. Making statements is also necessary.
IF your Councillors decide to move forward with decisions after people from the community have been engaging them, and the community is unhappy, there are a couple of petitions that you can launch as a community:
1) Petition Council to rescind the resolution. This is asking for Council to reverse their decision.
Here is the user-friendly handbook on how to petition your council.
2) Recall petitions. For each councillor that you want to be replaced, you will need an individual petition. This triggers byelections in the districts that each councillor was removed from. If all councillors are removed, then a full election will be called.
3) Petition the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Rebecca Schultz, for an investigation into the affairs of the municipality. The Minister may recommend a variety of options from firing/hiring staff, removing Council members and calling a by-election, to appointing an administrator to act in replacement of Council.
Side note: If enough people are dissatisfied with how the County is operating, this is always an option. 20% of the electors in the municipality have to sign the petition for a sufficient petition.
The user-friendly handbook on how to petition the Minister of Municipal Affairs (options 3 and 4)
4) Petition the Minister of Municipal Affairs to Initiate a Viability Review for the County. If enough people are disgruntled with how the County is being run, instead of Option 3, the Minister of Municipal Affairs can initiate a review of the County’s viability. This is requesting a review to dissolve the county. Effectively, once the examination of the County is complete, the Minister may dissolve the municipality and partition portions of the County out to other surrounding Counties. This petition can be undertaken at any point, and 30% of the County electors must sign the petition for it to be sufficient.
5) Hire a lawyer to represent the interests of the residents in your municipality.
It’s a lot of work to keep councils accountable if they are not conducting business in a way that is best for the residents of their county. We look forward to updates.
Email to Engage Ratepayers: PDF 1
Proposed Thorhild County Bylaw: PDF 2
We also recognize that this issue isn’t localized to our county! We’re encouraging people across the province and the country to start paying attention to their municipal LUBs, whether they are in a review or rewrite, and what stage of the process they’re in. Hopefully, an engaged and watchful public can keep the punitive and overreaching Land Use Bylaws from being enacted all over the country.
And if you’re on Facebook, we have a page there, too, where you can find discussions around this topic and others. Now that our proposed Land Use Bylaw has been defeated, we have shifted our focus to include Land Use topics in Thorhild County and other bylaw and legislative impacts to the community, both internally and externally (provincial and federal impacts). We want ALL of our communities in the county to remain cohesive and vibrant: Voice of Thorhild County
For land use bylaw information exclusively (for all Counties and Municipalities in AB), visit the Alberta Land Use Bylaw Watchdog group. We encourage you all to join that group to contribute and stay up to date on all things land use bylaw related in your own community!!
We can be found on Twitter, too: https://twitter.com/VoiceOfThor
Good luck and all the best!