The Town of Okotoks has launched a second phase of public consultations on its Environmental Master Plan.

Dawn Smith, Town of Okotoks environmental and sustainability coordinator, says it's a long-range planning document with the goal of protecting our environment for current residents and for future generations.

"What we've done is we've taken a lot of the feedback from Phase I and now we're delving deeper into specific topics that citizens have already pre-identified," Smith explains, "and asking more clarification questions about what they actually meant and testing where we want to go with those ideas."

The first phase of public consultation on the plan started in the fall of 2017 and wrapped up before Christmas. Smith says the town launched Phase II in January, initially holding stakeholder workshops with the development community.

Now, the public consultation process has expanded to a community-wide initiative. She says it's important residents contribute their voices to the plan because it's expected to guide future changes to the fabric of our community.

"It's a way that they can actually vote on their level of acceptance of a proposal or an idea," Smith explains. "Then, they can also make additional comments on what they like and what they don't like, and also make additional comments to other citizens' comments. So, it's more of an interractive tool than a traditional survey."

Smith says there are six major areas in the survey, including: Water management, urban design and transportation; energy emissions and air quality, ecosystems and agriculture, waste systems, and climate adaptation and relience, which she describes as a community's ability to recover from major climate-related weather events, such as floods.

The concepts explored in the online tool have already been introduced in various other communities. Residents are invited to comment on concepts such as doing away with single use items like plastic straws, coffee cups and plastic bags, the development of pollinator gardens, renewable energy initiatives such as solar projects, and the future design of neighbourhoods. There's also the idea of introducing an interconnected network of green infrastructure to urban environments and Smith says that's basically using vegetation to provide additional functions such as flood management and cleaning of storm water.

She says there's more than just traditional economics that need to be factored in when calculating the long-term benefits of some of these initiatives.

"So, we're looking at also implementing true cost accounting into all of our decisions going forward," Smith explains. "So, for example, while we may say for example, a waste program may cost this to divert recycling and organics, people tend to look, 'Well, what's the 10-year payback?' What's the 50-year payback in terms of the fact that if we don't do it, it will cost us multiple millions to build a new landfill."

She says there's a "whole host of ecosystem services that we get from nature," adding that the additional benefits, including an emotional and social connection that people can experience with nature, have value attached to them as well.

"The biggest thing we've heard from our consultations, even in the Community Sustainability plan, was people love our river valley," Smith says. "And that's because of the connection they get with nature, and that's immeasureable."

In addition to the interractive online survey tool, there's a community workshop scheduled for Thursday, March 8 at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers at the Municipal Centre as well as pop-up survey stations set up throughout the community.

To visit the Town of Okotoks's online survey on the Environmental Master Plan, click here.

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