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The matron of northern Alberta’s oil sands country — Fort McMurray — envisions a future beyond energy for a community built on bitumen.
Melissa Blake, the mayor of Wood Buffalo, the regional municipality made up of Fort McMurray and nine rural communities, is well aware her town — sitting on the largest deposit outside OPEC — has become synonymous with the oil sands.
“I can acknowledge that just about any other job that’s supported in Fort McMurray is one that is here to support those who work for the [oil] industry. But I also see the opportunity of being able to offer more cultural amenities, more social amenities, more retail and commercial opportunities — really allowing people who have creative energy to be successors in their own right,” Ms. Blake said in a phone interview from Fort McMurray. “If we turn our backs on those opportunities, we won’t be able to welcome a different era in the future.”
Fort McMurray is bursting at the seams: its population has doubled in the past 15 years to nearly 80,000, and the number is expected to surpass 200,000 by 2030.
Modernizing a half-century-old downtown core, bringing water and sewage treatment facilities up to urban standards, improving roads and Highway 63, the town’s main link to the oil sands, as well as investing in recreational and cultural facilities and attracting retailers are at the top of Ms. Blake’s agenda — investments worth billions.
Taxes account for 82% of the regional municipality’s $676.5-million operating budget, of which 91% comes from the rural, non-residential tax class, mainly property assessments of oil sands operators in the area, and expanding the municipality’s revenue base will be crucial for its long-term development.
Consumer services lag behind in a town without the usual familiar chains such as Costco, Home Depot, or Future Shop. There is only one dry cleaner in the region.
“If we can have access [to] the service supply industry that gets built up here for the oil sands and redeploy it for other purposes, it gives this community a life beyond this community,” said 43-year-old Ms. Blake, who has been mayor since 2004.
Jeff Penney, Wood Buffalo’s manager of economic development, said the area’s retail sector is not developed to the “level that it should be for a community of this size.”
The cost structure is pricey for retailers, with steep investments for sparse parcels of land — an acre of commercial land costs upwards of $2-million — and high labour rates to match the high cost of living.
Housing prices are among the highest in the country — a challenge in retaining many of the area’s contract workers, said Ms. Blake.
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