Simply put, 2012 needs to be a year of action for The Town of Taber on many, many different fronts.
The town has many infrastructure needs, and a few more coming down the pike, and some grave concerns revolving around our downtown and buildings like the administration office and the Centre Court for the Arts.
Taber’s water treatment plant, and the necessary repairs of a berm west of town, are the two high-need projects of 2012, along with potential work on the sanitary outfall system and our lagoon system.
But it does not stop there, as money will be required, should council proceed, for the administration building, a project which could top well over $1 million.
That is not to mention the Centre Court for the Arts. That project has been stalled for what seems like an eternity. Council should learn this month the results of a report, which will detail exactly what is required to bring that facility up to par.
We also have, or course, our annual recreation debate concerning the need for a new arena. You would be hard pressed to find many towns in Alberta with populations in the 8,000 range who have only one full sheet of ice — yet that is the situation Taber constantly finds itself in.
A second arena would bring more tournaments to town, tournaments which at this point are virtually non existent, and more traffic into Taber. Million-dollar renovations to the administration building or a million for a second, simple shell or an arena — that is a discussion.
That brings up perhaps the greatest need of all in Taber — downtown. A sinking feeling has enveloped the retail core for years now, and 2012 was a poor year, as seemingly business after business fell by the wayside.
Bar Al Beef, the Candy Store, Penner’s and Color Your World were all casualties in 2012, or are soon to be, and joined larger retailers like SAAN and the Bargain Shop in the dustbin of Taber commercial history.
Simply put, something needs to be done this year, and quickly, to revive downtown. Discussions with other communities, such as the ones Taber was just compared to with the recently-released financial indicators graphs, should be a first step.
Many other communities our size, with the problem of a large city in close proximity, have not experienced downtown stumbles to the extent Taber has, and research has to be done to reverse that trend now.
The agricultural interpretive centre idea also can’t simply be ignored, though a scaled-down model of the cadillac version first proposed would be more wise.
Taber has a multitude of studies and reports to comb through in 2012 on many of these above-noted issues. This year, the conviction and courage of council will be tested, in terms of getting some projects off the ground, and away from the planning stages.