Dan Hamilton

Election Day is getting closer by the minute including in Cypress County. Dan Hamilton joins Brian to talk about his campaign for Ward 5. Water is a big concern for both agriculture and business and Dan wants the county to be ready. Dan sees the potential for Cypress County to grow their economy and wants to continue to be apart of the decision making going forward.

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Transcript

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Inspire your peers. And and that's a tough job. I've been on it for seven years now. And, you know, sometimes things get out of control and you got to put your foot down and and stop things from happening. And, and then at the end of that year, you have to ask them for their vote to get back on count or the in the Reve. But it it's a, it's a position that's difficult to do. It's a challenge because then you're taking care of the whole county. But I appreciate the position and I respect the position for being there. This episode of Bring Back the Porch, brought to you by Bernie Leahy, River Street Realty. Let's get you home. And joining me on this episode of Bring Back to the Porch is Dan Hamilton, who is the current reeve in Cypress County and also seeking reelection in Ward five. Thanks for stopping by. Oh, I'm glad to be here. It's it's a little different in Cypress County in that you have a ward system rather than in medicine, that where you got 39 people chasing eight seats. In your case, you have one person that you are running against or with in Ward five, which includes Dunmore and Linville. So you're the smallest, I think, in terms of area, but the highest in terms of population. Yes. So I do have the smallest area, but we have the second highest population. Desert bloom in that area has has the highest numbers. It, yeah. It's, it's interesting being in the word system because like you said, it's just, just one person running against me, but there's a lot to do in, in the system. And there is a lot to do to take care of Dunmore and, and Victorville. Been on council for 12 years now. The first three years I was on council, it was only I was a councilor. That was. That is. And two years after that, I became the deputy reeve. The past seven years have been the reeve. I don't know if you understand how it works being the reeve, but it's. It's not elected by the. You're different than in medicine that when we vote for the mayor in Cypress County, you're elected by the other members of your council. Exactly. It's by your peers and and that's a tough job. I've been on it for seven years now. And, you know, sometimes things get out of control and you got to put your foot down and and stop things from happening. And, and then at the end of that year, you have to ask them for their vote to get back on count or, being the reeve, but it's, it's a position that's difficult to do. It's a challenge because then you're taking care of the whole county. But I appreciate the position, and I respect the position for being there. Yes, it's a challenge, but it's it's a good position to be in. It is it is a different system in the wards because basically the council or looks after their little area and the other, members of the council look after their areas and sometimes bringing everybody together to look at the big picture for all of Cypress County can be a little bit challenging. It is because everybody wants something for their area. But I think the council that we currently have has been very open minded on trying to do the best for the whole county. Economic development, taking care of the service level, all of those kind of things. Everybody has put their opinions in and trying to do the best they can. Yeah. Water, I think, is one of the big issues that you are always looking for in Cypress County, because we are in the semi-arid desert. So you always have that, I guess, to, to work about to work on with the other members of your council. Yes. Water, drinking water was a very big issue a few years back. Yeah. You had to obtain water rights in order to get them. Even though we have the lions coming in. We have the connection with the city. We can buy the water from the city, but if you don't have the water rights, you can't. You can have as much pipe in the ground as you want, and you're not going to get any water in that pipe. So Cypress County, about five years ago. Took the initiative and took the time to look into finding some water rights and purchasing water rights, water rights for the county. Then we hit the issue where you you're not allowed to stockpile water rights. You have to buy them and put them to use right away. So we had to find a system that we would be able to to allocate them in places and have them ready to go, even if we didn't need it today. So Cypress County staff and and council has done a very good job at getting getting prepared for the future and haven't water rates in hand to be able to move forward. I believe the province's there's only so many water licenses out there and and when they're spoken for, that's it. You're out of water. But that that is how it works. And I do believe that the province allocated too much water rights in the beginning. So in order for them to scale back on that, every time water rates change hands, you lose 10% back to the province. So if you buy a 100 acre feet, you only get 90 of that 100 acre feet. So it brings a lot of challenges in. And we saw the, the movement around water rights, during the drought. I think it was two years ago when the province was asking for cooperation from municipalities in terms of maybe being able to access water, for, not just for agriculture, but for people to drink. And then the other component of water is, fire protection, which is a big one in Cypress County. It is. Yes. And and fortunately, the province recognized the drought problem. So they have done a lot of work to make sure that that's not going to happen again. I mean, you can't control a drought coming in, but you can't control what's used if you think of droughts come. And so they they've learned where to stockpile it. They've learned what to do. So I think the province has done a good job on taking care of that. When you go, knock on the doors and you in Dunmore, you can go door to door nuts, which means some of the other bigger, wards that are in Cypress County. What are people telling you at the doorstep is important to them? People are talking about the taxes and want to make sure that the taxes stay low. The services, the service level, and pretty much what they're talking about. Are they happy with the level of service or are they looking for more? Well, everybody's always looking for more. Everybody wants. But don't make me pay for it. The how it is. And then when you bring forward what it would cost for that, it's like, oh well maybe we don't need that right now. Yeah. The other area too that you have to concentrate on in Cypress County is roads. I know reading some of the agenda's a recurring theme is always dust control. Yes. That roads does control our service level for the roads. It's a huge thing in Cypress County. Does control is a lot of money every year it's it's. But it needs to be done. It's, I would hope in the future that. Well, I'm predicting in the future that it's going to have to go to a more of a user pay kind of thing because it it is such an expensive part of our, our service level. It's going to have to be looked at. Something's going to have to be done with that. It's not something you can do once and then it's done. It's something it has to be done frequently in order to keep the dust down in the summertime. Yes it does. Some places that aren't that much for traffic, you can get away with it less frequently that go service it, but if you get on something that has a lot of traffic, we're always maintaining that, working them over and redoing it. And then in the wintertime you have the problem of snow removal. Yeah, yeah. Cypress County is a vast road system. There's a couple thousand kilometers of roads there, so there is a lot of work to maintain it all. Yeah. One of the issues that came up, I think, in the last council was the, Irvine Library. And, there was a lot of hurt feelings, I think, over that because they were going to take down a park that had been, set up as a memorial in Irvine. People in Irvine didn't really want it there, but the other people in Cypress County said, no, we've got the money here. We need to do this. And it was done. How do we recover from that? Well, I think, you know, there was a lot of work went into that, a lot of preparation went into that. Yes. Some people were against it. Some people were for it. The Memorial Park is still there. It's, it's brand new. It looks very good. It's well-used. I've seen that, the museum had their days out there this summer, and there was over 250 people that were at the library and use in the park. It's a well-used piece of land out there. The has come forth also with Irvine. We we just in the budget for $4.8 million in the revitalizing the hockey rink out there. We've done, we've done some roads and sewer systems out there. We've upgraded the water system, we upgraded the lagoon. So we've done a lot and put a lot of effort into into maintaining and taking care of urban. How is the tax base in Cypress County? I know for years it, was supported by a lot of the energy companies. Is that waning? Are you needing to find different, sources for taxation? And that's one of the things I'm reasons why I'm rerunning is, yes. Our linear assessment is slowly dwindling away. We have to find some new ways to bring in some tax base businesses that can produce some some decent taxes and bring some revenue into the county. And, you know, we've got a really good group of staff right now that are looking into the future. We have a CEO that, came from Rocky View and understands what it takes to bring business in and what we need to do. We have a fantastic corner. We have number one highway. We have number three highway. We have real. Number 41 two. Yes, we have everything here that we need to to bring business in. And Cypress County is looking into it. I mean, we've this year in our budget, we've added on another economic development officer. We have two one that take care of business that's already here. We want to make sure they're not neglected, but we also need to bring new business in. And we have do believe it's called Site Link that has conference that, gets picked across Canada and they only pick 2 or 3 places in Canada a year. We were picked. So we have okayed that that was put in the budget that'll be in this July coming up. And they bring in people from all over the world to look, Cypress County and the region and see if there's people that want to bring something here, produce something here. We have seen, work in Dunmore along, number one, heading east there. Will you put another service road in, I believe, to open up, some of those lots for development. Yeah. While that service road was put in, we bought that land so that we could take some pressure off of that satellites and and try and get traffic to move down that way. And yes, we bought the whole quarter. That's a first piece of land that Cypress County has ever purchased that we can actually turn back into doing some development on. So that is coming up this year or two. There's a lot of ideas coming forth with, highway development, highway development, some business. There's lots of ideas coming out there. And we're we're open for business. We're not, we have control of that. We can move things forward rather quickly. Rapidly? Oh. We spent time in the last few years to change our land use bylaw and do some things to get rid of some red tape in there, make it easier and streamline stuff to move forward. So the developers want to come in. We're ready to go. Is there a particular sector of industry that, Cypress County is hoping to attract? I think we're open for business, for everything. I mean, we always talk because of all the farmland. We talk about agriculture, but there's other businesses out there, too. There's lots of opportunities in this world that could come forward to bring in to to move forward with. Is there an opportunity being so close? Dunmore two Medicine Hat for you to attract an industry where people could maybe live in Medicine Hat but work out in Dunmore? All that's a huge factor as a region we can work together. If we brought the biggest factory in the Cypress County, everybody's going to leave a medicine hat. Everybody's going to buy their groceries, a medicine hat. Oh, we're not looking for the shopping malls and the car dealerships. We're looking for business. All of that stuff has to carry forward, and it has to go to the city. So to work with the city and the town of Radcliff, it's huge for us to all work together. I think that has been something that has been put forward in the last year or two of what are you calling it, the tri municipality plan or something like that, where you all get together and try to work together to bring business industry to this area. So there is a yeah, that the tri IDP is there's a couple things there that doesn't quite bring business in, but that's an IDP for us. But forward, I think it was back in 2009 when it started. We, I worked hard with a couple other councilors this past few years to get it changed and get it updated and get it a little more mover friendly so that we can work together. But the IDP is put in the place so that we're not overlapping stuff from the city to the county, and we can work together in certain areas so that you're not leapfrogging and you don't have a whole bunch of industry and then a whole bunch of houses, because they have a plan and we have a plan that's for us all. Sit down at the table and say, okay, this is our plan for residential. This is where we want to put this. And it's just to keep it running smoothly. Dunmore has grown over the last, but 15, 20 years. We see lots of new homes out there now. Anything being done to attract people to move to Dunmore? I think the big attraction and it's. I know my neighbors are going to be mad when I say it, but we have cheap taxes. So cheap is a relative term, you know? Yeah, but, our taxes are down, and, we have the lowest taxes in, in Alberta for our within the top 20 percentile. And and they are low. So that's an attraction. But you get a small town, the small hamlet atmosphere in Dunmore, and you're only seven minutes away from the city. So you got all the amenities of the city. What about Vineville? And always seems to get forgotten. It's up there on the top of 41. I drive by it quite frequently, but I don't know. It's anybody's. Are they building homes up there? Is their homes up there for people? Lots for people to build. I, I haven't looked at that, in a year or so. I know we spent, I think it was about 3 or 4 years ago. We spent about $2 million or $2.5 million and upgraded the water system so that we can take care of them. And they they have city water in ville there. There is some there was some vacant lots up there. I haven't heard of much building going on, but it's kind of landlocked. There. So it's it's a small little hamlet that everybody. Yeah. They enjoy a beautiful view from up there. Oh boy. Is it ever. Yeah. It's $1 million view. Yeah. What else is, on the hot, front burner for Dan Hamilton in this election? Well, like I said, I'm really I really want to see the economic stuff move forward. I'm I've started some things there that I want to continue and follow through with. And the other big one that I want to follow up on and, I can't get too much into it because a lot of people don't understand it. But the linear assessment. It's controlled by the province, and we've been. We've been dealing with the province for the past 4 or 5 years, trying to get this policy put in place or can stay the way it is, or we can understand where they want to move it to, or we can't have this where the all of a sudden the province will say, yeah, well, we're going to give, a break on the assessment here. Well, it affects our bottom line. We need to know that it's going to be secure. We need to have a a system set up that okay. We know that's what it's going to be. This is what we get to work with. We can't have the up and down fluctuation that we've had in the past. And it's massive. And I've even never thought I'd be the guy, but I was one of the ones. And Edmonton protesting it when it first came out, I was standing there holding a Cypress County sign with Shane Hawk and, you know, we took it to heart. We needed to get it taken care of. We have some staff members that are on some of the boards up there that are dealing with it, and it's just one of those things it's hard to explain to everybody. So I like to stay involved until at least those policies are put in place so that we don't have to explain it to anybody. Because I understand and it's hard to understand, but trust me, it's a lotta I couldn't get into the full details with you today, because it's. One thing that, city folk have noticed as we drive around in Cypress County over the last 7 to 10 years, is all of the windmills that are popping up. Wind power has become a big thing in Cypress County, and maybe to a lesser degree, solar power that brings in taxation and investment dollars. But it also cuts off a view for many people who live in Cypress County. And I don't. I think Cypress County went to the province and started to say, wait a minute, this is agricultural land. Maybe this is not the best use for it. And I think you were successful in getting the province to maybe change some of the regulations around, alternative energy. We we did go to the province because there is there was no regulation when they started coming in. We are I am personally not against it. I understand everything moves forward, everything has to change and things have to be done. But I guess we look at it, we we learn from oil and gas when they came in that now we have all these wells that are being abandoned and it's cost to the province money to take care of that. So that's one of the things that we were looking at saying, hey, we need regulation put in place right now so that we don't have the oil and gas or the abandoned well problem in 25 years because it's what happens. When it's over. Yeah, yeah. When it's over. What are we going to do with these big monstrosity of things out there that and we tried to get a few things put in, but, you know, we had a few farmers say, stay out of it. We want these things. So we went to the province and we got some regulation put in. But that was. How has it been working with the province over the last you've been, I think 2013 when you first. Yeah. But 12 years. Yeah. Working with the province because the provinces put in some changes to municipal government act that some people say the government's stay in your lane, this is ours and these don't cross the line. So that's a tricky one. Big. And you're exactly right. There has been some stuff put in. It's it's like running a mum and dad and saying give me some money, but don't tell me where to spend it because they are the ones that give us the grants. They are the ones. But we have to keep our autonomy for them and have municipalities. We need to be able to do what's best for our ratepayers in the in the municipality, so that there has to be a fine line there. The province needs to stay on their side of it. We stay on our side, but we still need to work together for the overall betterment of Alberta. Okay, looking into the next four years, what do you see the future of Cypress County looking at? I see it very bright. I see the stuff that we have, the go get that we have from everybody. I see a lot of positivity and a lot of things moving forward. Obviously there's things that are coming down the pipe that we're not allowed to talk about until they come out, but it's positive. I think we can all work together. I think we can move things forward. It it should be a good four years. All right. Well, we'll find out on the 20th of October what the next council in Cypress County looks like. Yeah that's Monday. Yeah. It's here already coming then. Hamilton, the reeve of Cyprus County and Ward five candidate for councilor. Thank you for your time and. Happy to be here. Thank you.