It was a meeting of federal and municipal minds this week in Airdrie.

Banff – Airdrie MP Blake Richards met with the members of Airdrie City Council to discuss areas of joint concern.

Richards says he tries to stay in touch with municipal councils throughout his constituency on a regular basis, but it’s particularly important to stay connected with Airdrie, the largest city in the riding.

“I see Mayor Brown and a lot of the councillors at events all the time, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to sit down for a half hour or 45 minutes where you can just talk about common issues that you’re working on together, or you should be working on together and just keep the other up to date on what’s happening at the other level. We sat down and had a good conversation.”

One thing city council was thinking about was infrastructure and the many projects that need funding in such a growing city. Richards says he really didn’t have any good news to pass along in that regard.

“The current government has made a lot of promises that they’re not keeping in terms of large dollars that would go into infrastructure that were supposed to create jobs in the process and we really aren’t seeing it. In the federal budget which came out recently, there really wasn’t any mention of infrastructure, so not a lot of new information I could provide for them in that regard.”

Apart from infrastructure, Richards says there was another area that impacts federal, provincial and municipal jurisdictions: the legalization of marijuana.  Richards says it’s a federal issue which will be implemented by the provinces and municipalities like Airdrie.

“A lot of the implications and the implementation of that kind of flows down to both the provincial and municipal level in a lot of different areas and there’s a lot of unanswered questions that people are left unprepared for as a result. We also need to look at how do we cover the costs of some of these things that we have to enforce when the tax dollars are flowing to a different level of government."  

Richards says, specifically, there are two things that were brought up by council that he has to do homework on.

“One is the 40th Avenue project.  They're going to get me more information on a couple of projects that they’re working on and I’ll try to put that forward as best I can from my perspective. With the growth we’ve seen in Airdrie, they become pretty great needs. We also had a bit of a discussion on the Smart Cities Challenge application that looks at a very innovative approach to health care with the Health Co-op. That’s a pretty exciting project and one that we’ll work together on the best way we can.”

Richards believes the meeting was productive and leaves both sides with more to do.

“I think we both left with a little bit of homework, both on my side and the cities side in terms of information that we need to get to the other. I need to push to find out where things are at with a couple of specific proposals and we’ll continue to keep in touch, like we always do, and work toward achieving our goals.”

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