by Jeff Burgar

High Prairie Town Council voted last week not to send a councillor or two off to an Economic Development confab coming up in Manning. It sounds like a good thing – business attraction and retention and more.

Councillor Donna Deynaka made the motion to not send. Mayor Linda Cox agreed, saying since council terms are coming to an end in a year, taxpayers would ony get a year’s value. This is a good point.

But it could be argued experience gained in these kinds of trips should apply for many years afterward. Arguing against that, any casual observer of any of our local governments would be hard pressed to identify positive outcomes of any seminars, conventions, trips, visits or what have you that councillors have attended. Those attending all too often seem to bring little knowledge home, other than how good the food was, or the scenery. Ten years or ten weeks later, it still isn’t enough value for taxpayer’s money spent. Yes there are times when the money spent was worth every penny. Just very few and far between.

One also has to ask, why go out of town to “learn something” about development?

It’s a simple truth that day in and day out, right in front of our local officials noses, are economic development opportunities not looked at, ignored, or simply not understood.

Just a few examples:

An organization called Community Futures, based in Slave Lake spends over $300,000 per year. Does this area west of Slave Lake get much value from that money?

The majority of tourism on Lesser Slave Lake is in the west basin. Did any local governments express any concern tourism, usng local and provincial money, was all promoted out of Slave Lake the last few years? No. Have they said much the organization that used to promote tourism, as bad as it was, is now defunct? Not a lot. Is there any plan to rebuild a west basin tourism promotion group? No.

Recently, Alberta Health Services toured a group of medical students to local hospitals. Well, two of them anyway – Slave Lake and McLennan. Is anybody concerned exactly why High Prairie was overlooked? A very few.

The Northern Alberta Development Council, a provincial body tasked with “growing the North” recently saw the paid person running the whole show move his home from the Council’s head office in Peace River, to Edmonton. Can one convincingly promote the North, when one does not want to live in the North? And let’s not even get started on working with our local forest industry, opportunities with local governments working together, and developing the old hospital site.

Really, do we have to send people to Manning to open eyes about these things and much much more? A few local councillors think so, and maybe indeed there are completely clueless elected and staff people in the area who could really benefit.

But for most of our electeds? They should do it on their own dime if they truly believe.

The rest should just buckle down and get to work on our local problems and opportunities.