A farmer northeast of Sherwood Park is horrified by plans to develop what’s currently agricultural land into a new subdivision full of homes.
Development in the Bremner area, just west of Highway 21 and south of Highway 16, could start in as little as three years.
“The land is a gift,” Lois Gordon said.
Gordon moved back into the community in the early 1980s but her land has been in her family for generations.
“People said to me, ‘Wouldn’t you become very wealthy if you sold your land?’ I said, ‘Yes, but that’s not the right thing to do.'”
Gordon fears she will be forced to leave as the county moves ahead on its plan to develop about 5,000 acres of land for future housing.
“There’s something seriously wrong with the way that the county has gone about planning for future growth,” Gordon said.
Roxanne Carr, mayor of Strathcona County, says it’s a done deal. Only two of the nine council members voted to preserve the land for agricultural use.
“The deal is done by the Capital Region Board,” Carr said, “and we must move on as a municipality.
“By 2044, we expect another 55,000 people will have to be absorbed in Strathcona County alone.”
That growth in Bremner would be close to the current population of Sherwood Park.
The debate on where to grow in Strathcona County started back in 2001 and the county said there is a larger regional plan.
There is no provincial legislation to protect prime farmland.
Mayor Carr says the county moved to do that and approved an agriculture master plan in 2015, but admits democracy beat out her effort to protect Bremner.
“The people have to go somewhere, we have jobs for them. We want quality of life and we don’t want sprawl in either Edmonton or Sherwood Park.”
South of Sherwood Park, landowners in Colchester said they want to see development, but the county voted to preserve that land instead.
READ MORE: Edmonton-area landowners feel frozen out from potential development
Marilyn Macyk told Global News 80 per cent of the landowners in the area do not want their land zoned small agriculture.
“We feel that we’ve been ignored,” Macyk said.
Gordon says she is also disheartened by the process.
“The folks in Colchester want to be able to develop their land, they don’t want to farm on poor soil… meanwhile in Bremner, the people here know what we’ve got; we’ve got Class 1 soil.
“We think they’ve got it completely upside down.”
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