St. Paul airport lights replacement, Lavoie subdivision purchase for $1M, and ICF completion soon

Shining a light at the airport

The Town of St. Paul and County of St. Paul have begun work this week on replacing the lights at the St. Paul airport.

The municipalities joined forces to apply for grant funding to replace the old lights, which were compromised over time, said Mayor Maureen Miller.

“We went back to the government with a joint application. It’s to the tune of $358,000, I think. But at present, the lights are compromised, which makes it a challenge for fixed wing to land.

Currently, fixed wing aircraft are being diverted at certain hours of the day to Elk Point. So fixed wing is now being diverted to, through certain hours of the day being diverted to Elk Point.

“While they do work, if they have enough notice they can shut their work off for the fixed wing to land and take off and continue to work. It’s a high level of communication that’s going on.

Miller estimates the work should be completed in six weeks to two months.

Lavoie subdivision purchase

St. Paul council is trying to address the lack of residential development space.

The town purchased the Lavoie subdivision for $1 million which they will sell to future developers.

“We’ve pretty well hit our boundaries. So if we were to do any development, we would probably have to approach the county in acquiring additional lands to do any further residential development,” said Mayor Maureen Miller.

The purchase includes 96 residential lots southeast of Glen Avon school.

“We are not into development. We are reaching out to developers that now there is land available that they could purchase for development,” said Miller.

ICF agreement for Town and County nearing completion

It’s an ICF and IDP rush for municipalities.

The provincial government is forcing municipalities that share a common border to have an Intermunicipal Collaboration Framework by March 31, 2020.

The Town of St. Paul is close to done with their ICF’s once they finalize the recreation portion with the County of St. Paul.

Mayor Maureen Miller said there were already a lot of joint agreements in place making the process easier.

“We now have structure around how County and Town would gather and how the framework would work about getting into that discussion. It’s actually been a very positive experience for us.

“Why the communities weren’t forced to work together before now is beyond me,” said Miller.

“I’m glad to get it off our plate and onto something else because it’s required a lot of tax dollars, even though they [provincial government] put that in there.

Ahead to the future

Mayor Maureen Miller says that by September, the town can begin to look at the future after these issues “that were on our plate” have been cleared up.

“We’ve got hospital challenges. We’ve got seniors housing, we’ve got affordable accessible housing. There are definitely some issues within the community that I think we can now focus on and make a plan for around for sure.”