There is one class of Alberta municipality where a property owner can legally cast a ballot in two local elections. There are 51 of them left, and no new ones will ever be created.
They are called summer villages. Alberta invented the category in 1913 so that lake lot owners could run their own affairs instead of paying into a municipality for services they used about ten weeks a year. Elections are held in summer, because that is when the owners are actually at the lake. Since 1995 the province has not allowed any new ones, so the 51 that remain are the entire set, permanently.
Ninety seven people and a provincial park
Rochon Sands is one of them. It sits on the south shore of Buffalo Lake, up Highway 835 from Stettler, and it carries the name of the Rochon family, who owned the land in the early 1900s. It incorporated on 17 May 1929. The entire municipality covers about 2 square kilometres.
The 2021 census counted 97 permanent residents living in 53 of its 156 dwellings. That same handful of people operates Rochon Sands Provincial Park under a lease from the province, which means fewer than a hundred year round residents run the campground, the day use area and a beach that books solid every July.
Try to imagine a city of a million people contracting out one of its parks to a body of 97 volunteers and part time staff. It would be a headline. Out here it is a Tuesday.
The lake is the harder problem
Buffalo Lake spreads across 93.5 square kilometres and averages 2.8 metres deep. A body of water that wide and that shallow swings hard when the weather turns, and it has been swinging for a century.
Alberta started building a fix in 1985. In 1996 the province began pumping Red Deer River water up 20 kilometres of the Parlby Creek channel to hold the lake inside its historic range. It worked, until the pumping was stopped over the risk of carrying invasive Prussian carp into the system. In March the province applied to restart it behind filters.
The water has kept dropping in the meantime. Council spent this season working out where residents could put their docks, because the lake was no longer where the docks were. That is the least abstract water management problem in the province, and it is being handled by a municipal council you could seat around two kitchen tables.
Why the category survives at all
The obvious efficiency argument says fold all 51 into their surrounding counties and be done with it. Fewer councils, fewer administrators, fewer audits.
The argument against is the one the 1913 legislation was making in the first place. A county with roads, bridges, fire halls and farm assessment across thousands of square kilometres is not going to spend much of its meeting time on shoreline erosion at one lake, and it should not have to. A summer village exists because a specific 2 square kilometres has problems nobody else is going to solve.
That is the same instinct that produced the UFO landing pad in St. Paul and kept the century old dam irrigating southern Alberta. Small places in this province have a long habit of deciding a thing needs doing and then doing it themselves.
Two ballots and one lake
The double vote sounds like a loophole until you look at what is being voted on. A cottage owner in Rochon Sands pays taxes there and lives with the consequences of decisions about the beach, the water and the road. The vote follows the property and the property is real.
Towns like this do not run on nostalgia. They run because a few dozen people show up to a summer council meeting and settle who cuts the grass, who staffs the gate and who keeps making the case for the lake to a province with bigger files on its desk.
Fifty one left, and not one more coming. Worth knowing they are there.
Should Alberta protect the summer village model, or fold them into the counties around them?
