The City of St. Albert’s COVID-19 Recovery Task Force has a new online engagement platform to gather community input on what COVID-19 recovery efforts should look like in the city.
The advisory committee, which includes elected officials, business and community leaders, has met biweekly since June to discuss the city’s path to recovery amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Task Force is keeping the St. Albert community top of mind as we’ve started conversations about how to be community ambassadors for our recovery,” stated St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron in a media release. "The Recovery Task Force is working towards addressing challenges and how our city will approach recovery.”
The main goal of the task force is to prepare a report and give recommendations for council’s consideration on strategies the city can take to help residents, businesses and not-for-profit organizations recover and remain resilient through the pandemic.
For example, in August the task force approved a recommendation for city council to advocate for testing and vaccination sites to open in St. Albert before the province announced the expansion of asymptomatic COVID-19 testing sites. It also moved unanimously to recommend that the city develop a vaccination implementation plan for when a vaccine becomes available.
A lot of brainstorming was done over the summer to narrow down action items around how to support the business sector and residents, and now the task force is working on finalizing an interim report with recommendations to council.
“Resiliency was always one of the key interests for me,” said Coun. Ken MacKay, who sits on the task force.
"We all hoped that we were a little bit more immune, not only to the pandemic but the economic impacts of that. But I think we can see that just like homelessness in St. Albert seems to be invisible, sometimes the effects of the pandemic are not as visible as they obviously are."
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the St. Albert community, with one in five households reporting job loss, according to the 2020 community satisfaction survey released earlier this week.
Last year, the firm Y Station found 67 per cent of respondents said the quality of life is "very good" in St. Albert. However, overall satisfaction has since dropped amid the pandemic with about 10 per cent more residents rating the quality of life in St. Albert as “good” compared to the last survey.
"Of course, your quality of life is going to suffer when your ability to get out into the community and get involved in your normal activities is limited. But I really want to focus on that resiliency, and I think that we have to have a balance between our business and our community support," MacKay said.
During the last meeting on Nov. 10, duplicate strategies were cleaned up in the interim report draft. There was talk about creating a “community hub” to develop connections within neighbourhoods, what supports residents may need and how they can access city services, and how task force members could become community ambassadors in recovery efforts, he said.
But finding a path forward needs to involve input from St. Albertans themselves.
“We need to really get out and engage with the public as much as we possibly can and to whatever mechanism we have,” MacKay said.
Until Nov. 30, St. Albertans can weigh in on Cultivate the Conversation, the city's online engagement platform, on what they think the task force should focus on to make sure the community recovers from the pandemic. This includes initiatives to support local businesses and social profits, the overall St. Albert community, and residents.
Engagement has been low with only one response recorded since the post was published two weeks ago. But MacKay said with more awareness, he hopes residents will take up the city's new platform.
"They can tell us whether the outcomes that we've identified are important to residents, and also identify some strategies moving forward – they might even identify something we're missing," he said.
The next meeting of the COVID-19 Recovery Task Force is on Dec. 9 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
