ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Chris Ollenberger from QuantumPlace and Three Sisters Mountain Village. Three Sisters Mountain Village has put forward two Area Structure Plans for Three Sisters Village and Smith Creek, something I know you’ve spent a lot of time working on. You’ve been part of the Three Sisters file and its various iterations for many years. How many years have you been part of this whole conversation?

CO: Probably over 10 now, in total.

RM: You’ve invested a considerable amount of time and effort into this, haven’t you?

CO: Yeah, it’s a significant project. We’re really proud of it. Council gave us some really clear direction back in 2017 with some of the things they wanted to see, so we have spent all of that time working on making sure that we understood their direction and complied with it.

RM: Part of the process before you released these ASPs was an extensive community consultation. You held a lot of public meetings and feedback sessions. Through all that, does the level of opposition and the organization of that opposition to this plan surprise you?

CO: No. Three Sisters has always been a hot topic in Canmore and there’s passionate people on both sides of that equation. We’ve taken the instructions from Council to heart. They asked us to present the whole picture, which meant that we really needed two Area Structure Plans so you could see the whole thing as the complete vision. It can be overwhelming, and there’s different aspirations different people have, but I’m not surprised. We have just as many passionate people as well that provided really solid input into it. There’s a What We Heard report that’s well over 200 pages of comments that we went through one by one, line by line, to see what and where we could incorporate it into these ASPs.

RM: Are there any specific examples of public engagement feedback that you were able to incorporate into these ASPs?

CO: There was a lot, but one notable example was the idea of the Innovation District that we put together because we have a lot of business people and entrepreneurs in Canmore that sometimes find that their business plans don’t align well with a land use district. Can I set up my business here? Nope, that’s not the type of business we want to see in that particular location so you can’t go there. What we wanted to do is create that Innovation District within the Village Centre that allows for new ideas to flourish and might not have some of the same constraints. We put it in a very prominent location so they can act off the synergy of the village core itself. That’s just one example. We heard a lot of feedback about the need for open space. Right now people informally use Three Sisters property for a lot of recreation, walking around, walking their dogs, sometimes they do skiing and things like that. They didn’t want to lose all of those opportunities as the land became development, so more than 40% of our Three Sisters Village was dedicated to open space as response to that.

RM: Let’s dig into a few of the issues that people have brought up. One has to do with this whole idea of the commercial/residential split, that if we don’t build the right amount of commercial and we build too much residential it will end up costing taxpayers in the long run to service those areas. Can you speak to that?

CO: Even within residential development it’s not correct to say that if it’s all residential it doesn’t work. It’s also predicated very heavily on the type of residential development. Like, let’s say we built Three Sisters as all single family homes. The financial impact of that would not look very good. It’s fairly well known that in North America, single family homes with double car garages out front and all those good things are not fiscally sustainable for municipalities. That’s why we really responded to the Municipal Development Plan and the Integrated Transportation Plan, because the town directed in both of those documents that they would like to see denser forms of development. We focused our energy on what’s called the missing middle forms of housing – duplexes, townhouses, stacked townhouses, low rise apartments, because not only are those forms of residential development sustainable from a municipal fiscal impact point of view, they also address affordable housing considerations. They can be also more climate emergency sensitive. A number of good reasons, but they’re largely also driven by the MDP and the transportation plan where the Town of Canmore says we would like to see more people walking, biking, using transit. You need a denser community to support those goals as well. Our plans not only provide for residential, the type that the town was looking for, but it’s also of the type that is fiscally sustainable for a municipality. Then you add onto that commercial which is typically taxed at a higher revenue rate than residential parcels are in Alberta. In the resort centre we have a significant portion of commercial to expand and diversify Canmore’s economy and build on the resort centre we’ve all been looking for.

RM: In Canmore for large developments, there has been a bit of a history of promises of a resort core of commercial development that just haven’t materialized years down the road. Do we need to be concerned about a bait and switch type of thing here?

CO: No, I don’t think so. I think, unfortunately, most people don’t understand that you actually need residents to support commercial services. It would be foolhardy for any developer to say they’re going to build 100% commercial and it won’t be supported by any customers. What you have seen is a community that has grown over time to the point that now it has some critical mass to it. One example of that critical mass being achieved is our recent Gateway at Three Sisters application. We’re bringing on a grocery store, gas station, carwash, restaurants, and we have a number of businesses in Canmore that want a second location in this area. There’s now enough population and density around it that you can actually start to bring the commercial services on. It’s a longer term investment for commercial so you need to make sure you have your customers there. I don’t believe it’s bait and switch at all. We’re just finally getting to the stage, and it’s been a tortured path to get there, I won’t debate that with anybody, but it is now a sufficient size that you can start to bring on the bigger commercial pieces that people have been looking for.

RM: I want to talk a little bit about undermining. I’ve heard so many different things about the risks of developing on the undermined lands of Canmore. There are a lot of people who I respect, whose opinions I respect, who have presented what looks to be really solid evidence about some of the risks there as well as some of the risks of the limited liability that the developer would have. Yet, I also see very solid evidence that the undermining has been mitigated and development will be limited. I really don’t know what to believe here. Can you share your perspective on this?

CO: In the early days of Three Sisters, like if you were to pull out say a 1990 map and say here’s all the high risk areas and here’s all the things that we’re worried about, they don’t really have a lot of borehole data. The first stages, like with the Peaks of Grassi, were avoidance. Peaks of Grassi doesn’t have mines right below it. The road leading the Peaks of Grassi is undermined and they knew that then. They did mitigation and they did appropriate utility installations. But there’s a mine below Cairns on the Bow. There are mines that are below most of the Stewart Creek subdivision in fact, in places two or three miles below the Stewart Creek subdivision. The Stewart Creek clubhouse is sitting on top of a couple of the bigger mines that are out there ,and they’re all in various states. The key to it is to make sure you have up-to-date information. One of the great things we had to start with, but didn’t stop at, was the mapping. The Canmore families did an excellent job of mapping their work in the mines with one of the best sets of mine maps that people have seen. Now we applied different sets of mitigation tools and technologies depending on what is actually out there. I’ve seen some information out there saying they’re going to fill the whole thing up with concrete. That’s not the case. That would only apply to certain select portions of the mines that are shallow enough and appropriate for us to use what’s actually called ‘paste’. It’s not concrete, but similar. Other mines are just so deep that there’s no impact, and that’s actually quite true in the majority of the resort village. I’ll focus on the resort village because there isn’t actually very much undermining in Smith Creek at all. 40% of the Three Sisters Village is not even undermined. About 50 to 55% of it has moderate undermining beneath it we need to pay attention to and assess. We have over 500 boreholes out there. Only 5% of the area has what’s called vertical workings. There’s been some aspirations out there that maybe the whole thing has these giant vertical workings. That’s not true. It’s actually a relatively isolated area and there are no buildings proposed on top of that. It’s really hard to say “this is the impacts of undermining” because you can’t just paint it with one big brush. You actually have to look at the bits and pieces in some detail. We’ve been doing that now very well since 1997 with a set of undermining guidelines that were used quite successfully. Now we have a brand new set of 2020 guidelines that have built on many, many years of experience and making sure that things are done accordingly. The risk quotients are already set out very clearly in Canmore’s Municipal Development Plan. Yes. it’s a geotechnical issue you have to pay attention to and yes, you have to hire qualified people to make sure you’re doing a great job of it, but it’s not an absolute impediment to development.

RM: The way that the plan aligns with the Municipal Development Plan, population growth, environmental concerns, wildlife, the proposal to expand the urban growth boundary. I mean, there are so many different things we could talk about for like a full hour on this, I’m sure, if we had more time. I’m just wondering if there’s a place online where you’ve collated the response to some of these that people can check out.

CO: Absolutely. You can go to our website. Both of these Area Structure Plans are fully transparent about the amount of units, the expected visitors, the acreage, and we provided a full copy of all the supporting studies. The Town of Canmore has all of that same information on their website too. We’ve have some summaries on ours. The Town has some FAQ’s. We all understand it’s a lot of information, but we’ve been fully transparent with our large application, the vision, and how it would roll out. This is a large vision. It’s not going to happen four months from now that we’re all done. Hopefully, with Council’s support, we’d be talking about the next couple or three decades of pretty slow, steady improvements that just carry on at a pace that’s probably reasonably similar to what we’ve seen in Canmore for the last 20 years.

Filed under: Canmore, Three Sisters Mountain Village