Q: What does a sustainable community mean to you?

Sustainable communities embody the principles of sustainable development.
They balance and integrate the social, economic and environmental components of their
Community. They meet the needs of existing and future generations. They must also respect the needs of other communities in the wider region.

I recognize that communities are diverse, reflecting their local circumstances. There is no standard template to fit them all. But they should be: active, safe and secure, well run with effective participation and leadership, environmentally sensitive and should be strategically built to maximize the community’s future potential.

We want to measure our community’s ‘Human Wellness’ with a new balance sheet. As a municipality we need to move beyond the typical dollars and cents approach to wellness and look deeper at the other issues such as access to recreation and wellness opportunities, family violence prevention, ethnic diversity and trust and belonging.

Q: What are some of the major challenges facing the City of Leduc today? What sets it apart from other communities in the surrounding area?

The City of Leduc is unique in that we manage part of the 2^nd largest industrial park in North America. We are one of the fastest growing communities in Alberta with housing starts increasing at an exponential rate. Trying to manage this growth and development in one of the hottest economies in North America leads to a number of unique challenges.

One of the ways we are trying to manage those challenges are by tying our ‘Genuine Wealth Assessment’ to our business planning and strategic planning cycles. The City of Leduc is one of the first communities in the world to have undertaken a genuine wealth assessment and use it to plan for out future. This truly sets us on a path to sustainability, as well as setting us apart from other communities in our region.

The City is also unique in using our Genuine Wealth Accounting Model. The model incorporates 22 human well being themes into Genuine Well Being Index. For each indicator we are able to use those statistics to inform and influence our municipal policy decisions.

Q: The City of Leduc is committed to becoming a sustainable community. What are some of the factors leading up to this decision?

One major factor that led to our decision was the realization that our energy sector will not last forever. There is more to a genuinely wealthy community than just a hot economy. We need to ensure that the future remains bright for our citizens long after the oil and gas are gone. We have a very forward thinking Council in Leduc and it is a credit to their leadership that the City undertook the Genuine Wealth Assessment and has used it to guide our operations even with so many outside pressures.

We are committed to our new indicators of wellness and sustainability. We know that a community with a growing, happy and genuinely healthy population is a key component of long term sustainable progress.

Q: Was there a Council decision or what form of consensus decision-making helped you achieve agreement to follow a sustainability path?

City Council made the decision to undertake our Genuine Wealth Assessment. But our Council has also gone one step further and has adopted 6 pillars of sustainability for their own planning and strategic purposes. The pillars are:

• Natural and Built Environment
• Social Wellness
• Recreation and Culture
• Economic and Tourism
• Governance
• Organizational Capacity

Q: What are some of the challenges you face with your position in helping to take Leduc down this path?

Sometimes you find people believe that sustainability and pure market driven development or economic growth are not entirely compatible. The challenge is in educating people. Ensuring that everyone knows growth and development are complimentary with each other is a huge issue that needs to be overcome. We can ensure that as we grow, we build cost savings, environmentally sensitive technologies and other sustainability enhancements into our growing subdivisions, commercial and industrial areas.

Q: What advice would you give other municipalities who are on the path or about to go down the path of becoming a sustainable community?

The best advice is to identify what sustainability means and ensure that everyone buys in to the concept. We are lucky that our Council has identified sustainability as a real priority and have given their direction to us to enact that decision. Municipalities also have to educate their public, and demonstrate how this will help the community over the long term.

Q: What are some of the tools that you would like to see CSCD develop that could help you in your position to make your community more sustainable?

We would like to see the development of an educational tool kit or educational package that municipalities can use to bring about a common understanding of:

• What community sustainability is?;
• What the relative cost savings are to encouraging sustainable development?;
• How can the community become involved in promoting sustainability?

If communities can help each other, share information and help build this educational piece, we can affect how sustainability is viewed on a national scale. If every municipality can approach the issue with a common understanding of what it means to be sustainable, they can tailor their approach to meet their individual needs. This means a stronger position from which to advocate for increased recognition of our sustainability needs from the other levels of government.

Q: What are some of the major challenges you face in your position in getting Council, staff members and the community to move in this direction?

As I mentioned before, challenges lie in the education component of sustainability. It is a relatively new concept for municipalities which have often been driven solely by growth, and in the case of some major metropolitan areas, uncontrolled growth leading to huge infrastructure deficits.

Q: How do you engage the community?

We currently use common practices, such as open houses, surveys and in particular our local media including the internet. We try to be proactive in disseminating information out to the public on a regular basis.

The City of Leduc also holds a bi-annual Community Visioning Conference. Every two years our population is able to engage with Council and our administration and give us their vision for the City of Leduc. We then use this input as we create out corporate strategic priorities and tie this back to our Genuine Wealth Assessment.

Q: The City of Leduc has launched a number of new initiates in the last couple of years. What are some of those initiates that you are most proud of?

In particular, we launched our Genuine Wealth Assessment project. I have mentioned it before, but we can expand on it here. On May 15, 2006 the Leduc Genuine Well-being Report was released providing an important diagnosis of the conditions of economic, social and environmental well-being of the city of Leduc.

The Genuine Wealth assessment for 2006 establishes an important baseline of wellbeing indicators and a new “balance sheet” for the community of Leduc that reveals the physical and qualitative conditions of its key assets: human, social and natural capital as well as built (physical infrastructure) and economic or financial capital. Like a balance sheet, the Genuine Wealth indicators account for Leduc’s strengths (assets) and its weaknesses (liabilities), pointing to areas that could be improved.

Q: How do you keep the momentum going? How do you sustain your sustainability efforts?

Since the Genuine Wealth Assessment is tied to our business cycle, we never lose sight of our goal to improve the quality of life in Leduc and to make our community truly sustainable. We tie both our typical measures of sustainability to our genuine wealth in human terms.

Q:  What motivates you personally to do this?

I have children, I see our community’s children playing at our facilities and enjoying our amenities and I don’t want them to have to grow up outside this great community. I want future generations to have a choice to live in Leduc and for it to be a vibrant place, a pleasant community to live in, which offers quality of life, employment opportunities and world class facilities.