Council approves office borrowing bylaw
Crowsnest Pass council has approved second and third reading of a borrowing bylaw authorizing up to $2.5 million for office upgrades tied to the municipality’s future move into its new administrative space at Crowsnest Commons.
The municipality’s borrowing bylaw page states Bylaw 1259, 2026 authorizes debt of up to $2.5 million for office upgrades, with repayment over a term not exceeding 20 years. The bylaw first received first reading Jan. 27. The municipality also advised residents they had until Feb. 19 to submit a petition for a vote of the electors, with 602 valid signatures required. No sufficient petition was raised.
The vote came after one of the meeting’s longest and most contentious debates, with councillors split less on whether the project should proceed than on whether they had been given enough detail to be comfortable approving the borrowing now.
The municipality announced July 10, 2025 that it had confirmed a lease agreement with Shift Real Estate for new municipal office space at the Crowsnest Commons development site, with construction expected to begin soon and the move anticipated for fall 2026. In that release, the municipality said the current office, nearing 50 years old, no longer meets the needs of staff or the public and cited aging infrastructure, asbestos and limited public space as key concerns.
At council, CAO Patrick Thomas said the work now before council was not the base building itself but the municipality’s interior tenant improvements. He described the shell as the landlord’s responsibility and said the municipal portion includes the inside work needed to make the building functional.
“Our work would essentially start being awarded as soon as tomorrow,” Thomas said, noting some electrical work needed to happen before drywall was finished.
Councillor Doreen Johnson said she still had major questions even after additional information was provided following an earlier deferral.
“It’s hard to approve something we really don’t understand,” she said.
Johnson said she was not trying to stop the project but wanted a more thorough briefing on what exactly the municipality would be paying for. She said the broad categories in the report were still not enough to fully explain what council was buying.
Mayor Pat Rypien said council needed to understand where “four and a half million dollars is spent,” calling it a lot of money.
Thomas said the costs add up quickly in current construction conditions and noted that even the electrical portion alone comes in at roughly $600,000.
Councillor Darren Nastasi said he had supported the budget, including the borrowing, but wanted to be sure the municipality was not setting itself up to be paying lease costs on an unfinished building if it delayed further.
“I don’t want to be paying 35 or 40,000 bucks a month and walk into an empty shell,” he said.
Councillor Dean Ward argued delay would almost certainly make the project more expensive, pointing to past infrastructure work where postponement increased the eventual cost. He also tried to put the debt in practical terms for taxpayers, saying the annual impact was much smaller per household than the headline number of millions might suggest.
Ward also argued the bylaw sets a ceiling, not a required borrowing amount, and said future surplus funds or reserve changes could potentially reduce how much the municipality ultimately needs to borrow before the loan is finalized.
Thomas confirmed the bylaw authorizes borrowing “up to” $2.5 million and said partial draws are possible depending on final costs and available funding at the time of borrowing.
Councillor Tony Vastenhout was among the most critical voices, saying the process had left both the public and new councillors in the dark. He said there had been too little public input and too little explanation of a project that will have long term financial con-sequences.
“We as new councillors were left in the dark,” he said.
Thomas responded that the decision to move into leased space was debated by the pre-vious council roughly two years ago and was tied both to the municipality’s need for up-dated office space and to helping get the Crowsnest Commons development moving by acting as an anchor tenant.
He said building a completely separate stand-alone municipal office elsewhere would likely have carried a far higher capital cost, possibly closer to $10 million once a full building, parking and site works were factored in.
Rypien acknowledged concerns raised by Johnson and Vastenhout but said council was now in a position where the project had already advanced too far to stop.
“I think we have no choice but to move the project forward,” she said.
The bylaw ultimately passed, but not unanimously. Johnson opposed second reading and again voiced concern before third reading, suggesting council should at least dis-cuss whether some portions of the project could be phased differently to reduce immediate borrowing needs.
That idea went nowhere, with multiple councillors saying it was too late in the process for that kind of restructuring.
The final vote cleared the way for the fit up to proceed, although the broader political ar-gument around how the project was communicated and scrutinized is unlikely to fade anytime soon.