Jeremy's First Law!

People say there's a first for everything. This week's first will be drafting a bylaw for the County of Smoky Lake.

After last weeks triumph (finally finished reading over 1200 bylaws), I will now engage in the process of writing my first law for the county. It will be an omnibus bylaw containing 18 repeals and 3 amendments.

All of the repeals, except for 3, are to do with expired leases. The other 3 repeals rescind a land-use bylaw, a redundant bylaw on elections, and a bylaw establishing a library board that was scrapped two decades later. The amendments I am including in my bylaw are all to do with typos made that reference incorrect bylaws.

So after reading all the bylaws on record and compiling information on each one of them, I'm learning why it's important to conduct these reviews in order to repeal redundant laws, and clean out obsolete ones. Of course, the case at Smoky Lake is that there is limited man power to do such things.

So, my next two projects in sight are to draft this bylaw and present it to the county manager before I go to council with it, and also draft a policy tailored to the County's needs that implements a bylaw review strategy, including the grounds on which bylaws may be repealed or amended.

I'll keep you posted on developments!