Shovels, and not just the ceremonial ones, are in the ground on the Symons Valley Centre Library in the northwest community of Sage Hill, as Calgary works to address a gap in amenities in new communities.
Officials from the City of Calgary and Calgary Public Library were on hand Wednesday to break ground on the $43-million project, which includes a 15,000-square-foot library, a multi-modal street, and parking facilities.
The facility will replace the current library in Sage Hill which, at 1,700-square-feet, is one of the library’s smallest branches; it opened in 2017 as a temporary space.
“It was a small library that was just meant to fill the gaps until the new Symons Valley library opened,” said Calgary Public Library CEO Sarah Meilleur. “It is packed. This library and the users of this library circulated over 180,000 books last year; this is a community of readers.”
The $43-million project is set to be complete in mid-2028 and comes after years of advocacy from the community.
According to Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness, the project was deprioritized when she was first elected in 2021 and required significant work to demonstrate the value it would have to the communities of Sage Hill, Kincora, Sherwood, Nolan Hill and Evanston.
Wyness said building amenities for new neighbourhoods in her ward remains a challenge.
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“We just don’t have the services. I do not have the transit, I do not have the libraries, to meet the growth of people choosing to live in the suburbs,” Wyness said. “Building a library like this allows us to show that we have not forgotten about where people are choosing to live.”
According to city officials, Sage Hill is one of Calgary’s fastest-growing areas and is one of more than 40 new communities in various stages of development on the city’s outskirts.
Despite recent announcements about Calgary Transit in the area, some who live in the area said the services and amenities still haven’t caught up to the thousands of new residents.
“It would be nice to see infrastructure while they do their planning,” Inge Kelly told Global News. “At least plan for it, not 10 or 12 years down the road.”
David Cooper, principal at Leading Mobility, said the challenge of increasing the level of services and amenities isn’t a new issue for neighbourhoods on the city’s outskirts, and it isn’t unique to Calgary.
Cooper said developers build the core infrastructure like water pipes and roads but city services take longer to catch up due to constraints for operating funds in the city budget.
“We’re good at putting in the infrastructure so that the area can function but there’s always been a lag in getting the city services that Calgarians expect in these new communities because it’s costly,” he said.
According to the city, there are a number of a new projects underway to address the gap including the Rocky Ridge Athletic Park, as well as the Belmont Fieldhouse and Library, as well as a library and fire station in Walden.
Catching up with the backlog is part of the city’s $50-billion infrastructure gap, Calgary mayor Jeromy Farkas said Wednesday, in which which he has vowed council will begin addressing during the next four-year budget.
Farkas said there will be “hard decisions” during budget talks in November to ensure service levels meet the needs.
“There’s a term that I think Calgarians are going to get used to from this council in the next four-year budget: capital velocity,” he told Global News. “How do we get these plans, these strategies, these hopes off the shelf and shovels in the ground as soon as possible? That’s job number one.”
The mayor noted city council will also need to find ways to grow the city in “a more even way” to address some of the root causes of the infrastructure gap.
He said Calgary’s growth has historically been through “starts, stops and spurts.”
“In the seventies, there were a lot of rec centres and libraries built and then nothing was built for a good 15 to 20 years. What that meant is the bill came due for maintenance on all of these facilities simultaneously,” Farkas said. “It’s about smoothing out these major facilities so it’s not feast and famine, but we’re gradually chipping away at the deficit.”
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