Residents, landowners and stakeholders in the Crossfield area had the opportunity to attend an open house March 14 to learn more about a Joint Area Structure Plan (ASP) in the works for the community – a collaboration between Rocky View County (RVC), the Town of Crossfield and students at the University of Calgary.
“This project is really fun because we are working with a community planning class through the Faculty of Environmental Design,” said RVC Planner Amy Zaluski. “It helps us move the plan along a little faster, and it gives the students an opportunity to get some valuable work experience so that when they are ready to go out and start their career, they’ve already worked on things like consulting with landowners and organizing public engagements.”
The ASP project was launched in January, Zaluski said, to deal with a section of land located between Highways 2 and 2A. According to Zaluski, when RVC and the Town of Crossfield reached an agreement on a 2009 annexation, some of the land between the two highways was included in the annexation, but part of the land remains under RVC ownership.
“We’ve agreed to plan it jointly, but it hasn’t gotten off the ground until now for us to start working on the actual plans,” Zaluski said. “It was identified in the Intermunicipal Development Plan adopted by the municipalities, and this is the next step in moving it forward.”
The open house was held following a landowner meeting in February, as an opportunity for students and planners to get some feedback from the community on some of the draft concepts that were developed based on recommendations from that meeting. Zaluski said these drafts will now be refined and presented at another engagement session in April.
“The class runs from January to April, so this portion of the planning has been fairly compressed,” Zaluski said. “After this next public engagement, there will be a bit of a gap before we come back to the community again, so (RVC) can do the technical work required for the plan.”
Zaluski said the main land use proposed for the plan area will be industrial and business commercial, since the section is sandwiched between two highways. According to Zaluski, the Town already has plans for residential expansion to the west of the community, making the ASP area ideal for a “planned business park.”
“The folks who came out for the open house were very engaged and asked the students a lot of great questions,” Zaluski said. “They liked the ideas so far, and brought a lot of suggestions of their own, so it was a really positive event and we are looking forward to the next one.”
More information about the ASP is available on RVC’s website, in the “Plans Under Review” section of the Building and Planning tab. Zaluski said interested residents can sign up to be included on an email notification list.
