Village of Stirling passes updated land use bylaw

Posted on February 27, 2025 by admin

By Kristine Jean
Southern Alberta Newspapers

The Village of Stirling now has an updated land use bylaw that will help facilitate future development for the growing southern Alberta municipality.  

Councillors unanimously passed Land Use Bylaw 549-24 at the Feb. 5 regular council meeting and a final copy, with revisions, which is currently being drafted, will be posted on the Village of Stirling’s website, when completed.    

“We ended up bringing forward a bylaw that we believe that is going to help streamline (and improve land use development in the village), and meet the community’s needs,” said Village of Stirling CAO Scott Donselaar. “(It will) also be compliant with provincial legislation and mirror the other two preceding pieces of legislation ( the IDP and MDP) that it’s actually answerable to.” 

The village revised their inter-municipal development plan (IDP) in 2019 and focused on their municipal development plan (MDP) in 2021 because both were very old and antiquated and outdated explained Donselaar, noting the next piece of legislation to be looked at was the land use bylaw, which had not been revamped since 2008.   

“Our land use bylaw has had, since 2008, a number of amendments done which were all consolidated into one bylaw,” said Donselaar. “But there was further work that could be done and had to be done to make it now conform with the existing inter-municipal development plan and municipal development plan.” 

The village initiated the process of re-doing their land use bylaw in the summer of 2024 and engaged with the public via a public hearing last fall in October, and following the public hearing, amendments were made. The bylaw was brought back to council for the second and third reading in  February 2025. 

In addition to several required administrative changes to the land use bylaw, there were several changes to uses and what the community wanted to see as permitted uses and discretionary uses, noted Donselaar adding that with most of the use categories in zonings, there were “more things moving into permitted and more things permitted in discretionary.”  

“It was a way to enable more opportunities and make some opportunities that are regularly approved through our planning commission, a permitted use,” said Donselaar, noting an example of a commercial business that is consistently approved, and where the village had certain types of retail as a discretionary use, council chose to make it a permitted use as there was no concern among residents. 

“Things like that were proposed and those are things that people were allowed to speak for or against when it came to the engagement of the public hearing,” he said, pointing out about 34 residents attend and a total of five people spoke at the public hearing. 

“We did have provision in there for a proposal to permit class A licenses in restaurants and there was a general consensus from the community that didn’t want to see that, so that provision was removed,” said Donselaar. “All liquor license classes except for special event licenses are prohibited.”    

With the updated, revised bylaw is expected to play a positive role in helping facilitate future development in the Village of Stirling and is an important update for the community, noted Donselaar. 

“The nature of the community has changed over the course of that time,” he said pointing out several revisions helped address some inefficiencies and allowed for improvements. “We’ve captured that and taken note of that over the course of that time frame … and this is the ability to be able to take all that information, compile it into something new and give the public an opportunity to have their feedback and input into it as well,” said Donselaar. 

According to information collected in the last census, the Village of Stirling is the fastest growing community by population demographic in Alberta, and today has a population of just over 1,300 people.