In my travels the last few weeks, I’ve driven through and/or spent time in a number of Alberta communities, towns that are of similar size to Taber.
Following around my son’s summer-baseball team, I took trips to Lacombe, and drives through Olds, Drumheller and Strathmore. In each town, some of which are a little bigger and some a little smaller than Taber, one thing became abundantly clear — Taber is lacking in a number of areas. And it’s not just the above-mentioned communities I base that statement on. I’ve been in a lot of other small towns — Wetaskwin and Innisfail among them, and I have to say, Taber is falling behind a lot of these areas.
As one example, let’s take a look at Lacombe. It is a bigger community than Taber, at about 11,500 people, but it has done an amazing job at sprucing up its downtown core. It is filled with murals, and every street corner downtown looks like Taber Square, Taber’s one fancy retail-core intersection, but only better. Simply put, a drive through Lacombe is a complete shock.
It is amazing how much work has been put into downtown, and gives an impression Lacombe is a community where the retail core takes business seriously, and the backing of the town must certainly be there.
I don’t know how all of this work was financed, but it gives you an extremely positive impression of the community, which also appears to have a strong retail, with a lot of different shops. Lacombe even boasts a movie theatre, despite the facts it’s a mere 32 kilometres away from Red Deer.
Taber’s downtown, on the other hand, has gone through round after round of failed revitalization efforts. Many plans have been drafted, committees struck and conversations held. To this point, much of those discussions have been for not. We do have our one revitalized intersection, and sidewalk work has been done, so things are moving ahead. However, the time has come to seriously take a look at stepping things up a notch, which will take the combined efforts of the town, province and Taber’s retail merchants, who have been reluctant to sink any money into past design plans.
On the other side of the coin, there’s Olds, a town of under 7,000 people. The highway-commercial development that has taken place there is off the charts. Taber’s highway development in the Wal-Mart area, which was supposed to have a second anchor tenant and a rumoured Ramada hotel chain location, has stalled, while Olds has thrived.
The amount of retail businesses on the highway corridor is impressive, and leaves me to wonder how that community has pulled it all off.  Again, Olds looks like a community on the upswing, at least according to a quick drive through town.
It may be a little unfair to compare Taber to Strathmore, with a population of just over 10,000, and a community that has the benefit of being the last big stop on Highway 1 before Calgary. But again, Strathmore’s highway-commercial development is impressive, and begs travelers to stop at numerous locations along the way — not something I can honestly say about Taber.
What’s the first impression people get driving Highway 3 through Taber? I can tell you, it’s very likely nothing like the impression received driving through Olds. We have some nice scenery with the golf course to the north of the highway but past there, there’s some vacant, decrepit buildings, an old, vacant former railway lot and the Wal-Mart complex. To me, that doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.
Drumheller, at about 6,500 residents, has the advantage of being isolated from a major Alberta city. As such, its retail core has more options, since a quick trip to a neighbouring city is out of the question. Still, once again, Drumheller has a lot of options Taber simply doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if Taber had a Source for Sports location like Drumheller, or a sporting-goods store of any kind? It’s pretty bad when you can’t even buy a decent hockey stick in a town of 8,000 people.
A town like Innisfail, which is smaller than Taber, just over 30 kilometres from Red Deer, has its own movie theatre, for example. Wetaskiwin, which has over 11,000 people but is a mere 35 kilometres from a bigger centre, Leduc, also has a movie theatre.
Certainly, there are demographic issues at play here with these other communities, some of which have larger trading areas and more resources than we do but the fact remains, Taber is in need of a substantial boost.
So, what’s stopping Taber from getting a movie theatre, a sporting-goods store, a revitalized downtown or more highway-commercial development? For starters, there appears to be a defeatist attitude here. You hear it from everyone. Most people believe shoppers will continue to head to Lethbridge, no matter what is offered in Taber. To be sure, the lure of more options, better selection and perhaps even better prices will always be there, as it is for all the above-listed communities situated near major centres.
The trick is for Taber to find its own niche, its own way of competing with Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. It may take someone willing to risk failure, whether it be a movie theatre operation or a sporting-goods outlet. It may take a thorough revitalization to downtown or an aggressive promotion of our highway-corridor potential (after all, we are pretty well situated to exploit this, being right between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge).
It may take Taber promoting its agricultural heritage, and using that as a spring board to economic development. Talk of an agricultural interpretive centre is a good start, for example, and could act as a springboard to developing a downtown theme for the future.
At the end of the day, there are no easy answers but the fact remains, there needs to be some more solutions brought to the table.
With a municipal election nearing in October, now is the time to ask the questions and bring these issues to light, should residents deem them worthy of discussion.