Salute to the oil and gas industry

[Horse]

When I was reeve and on council I gave people straight answers horse, sometimes that isn't what they want to hear !!! I was always adamant that the county live within its means and not debenture for anything unless it was municipal services that were going to be paid back through an offsite levy.

Barrhead County is certainly an agricultural based municipality, and I doubt if you have the urban sprawl at your doorstep so you can take comfort in that.
The town of Barrhead seems to be growing some, judging by the street improvements and new housing areas.

The assessment throughout the province went up whenever municipalities moved to the market assessment. My taxes doubled the year that happened.

Your neighbouring county, Woodlands, is one of the richest municipalities, with lots of resource revenue from the oil and gas assessment plus the odd mill, but with a lot of their land in the green zone there are lots of areas without much population, where your municipality is noted for its good farm land and some very productive farmers, plus one good sized feedlot. If you don't have the resource revenue you don't have the adverse effect that goes with it horse !
Lac Ste Anne County is getting more resource revenue but for many years they were not a very well do to municipality.

[cowman]

In the paper yesterday there was an article about the expansion of oil refining east of Edmonton. This is basically refining the heavy crude coming out of Ft. Mac? This area is literally going to be one of the largest oil refining areas in the world!
The local Hutterite colony at Red Water figures all 22 families will be instant millionaires. They quoted land prices at $10,000/acre and this developement will take up a huge area. Sturgeon County has just zoned 50 sections more land for heavy industrial and the quote is 330 sq. kms of developement! It will take a labour force of 20,000 men five years to build it! If you are a younger person get your butt into an apprentice ship program and make some money! A welder can pretty well name his own price. The oil and gas industry is screaming for tradesmen and laborors...really no excuse for anyone bemoaning that they can't get ahead?
Red Deer College is building a trades/manufacturing innovation center where they will be able to crank out a lot of trades people. $27 million to get it built and some construction starts May 1st! They will be offering a "rig technician" course...the same thing we learned rough necking on service rigs...I presume? And if you ever think those boys don't earn their money on a service rig...just try it! It is a hard job and certainly weeds out the boys who can't cut it! Makes for tough men though!

[cowman]

and a bit scary when working over sour wells with a green crew !!!!
Edmonton already has refinery row spewing lord knows what into the air, and now more on the boundary, the air quality in the city will be as bad as Calgary pretty soon !!!
Glad I live out in the backwoods ! Horse, you should appreciate your county and the lack of industry, pretty soon your land will be worth a fortune to people wanting to get away from it all !!!

[Horse]

Realy no reason for not getting ahead. Just like in Fort Mac you make big money and you give it to those in power ask anyone who works there and you will see the few that control the land take all the money and the workers are just a flowthrough unless you are in the 6 figure salery but most are not.
If land in Redwater is 10,000 per acre how does that help any one but the land owners and developers or are you saying should have been there sooner.
By the way what is the mill rate in your countys?

[Horse]

residential and farmland 5.0000
Education on above 4.34

Non-residential 8.7000
Education on Non-Res. 6.7000

Some municipalities also include a mill rate for Seniors Foundations ours does not, it comes out of the regular assessment.

[cakadu]

The flip side of that cowman is there goes more ag land out of production. We are slowly eating away at our land base and there will be less and less to grow food with. I guess it won't matter because everyone will have so much money that they can afford to pay whatever the food we import costs, right?

There is a huge cry for apprentices and skilled trades. Please put the emphasis on skilled. The problem is that employers are stretched so thin right now that they don't have time to take on apprentices - they want people who can hit the ground running.

It also costs money to go to school - if you're in school you're not earning and for some that is significant. There is no doubt that tradespeople will be in very short supply for at least 10 years if not more.

High schools are having a hard time keeping kids in school because of the lure of money. Bottom line in today's trades you have to have and understand math among other things, so getting that education is important. Do we really want to be creating a generation of not having finished high school?

We keep flogging the money, money, money aspect of things but we don't want to take a long hard look at the social and or environmental costs of what that rush for money.

[cakadu]

A member of my family is apprenticing in a trade and was scheduled to attend a specialized training course in February. The company could not do without him at work, so they scheduled his training for the last two weeks in April and are paying him his regular salary and all his expenses at school to ensure he is going to come back and work for them and not 'jump ship' to their competitor who has already offered him two dollars an hour more.

His Dad, has advised him not to burn his bridges with the company that has kept him busy for the past five years, but its a prime example of what is happening everywhere.

The service station where I by gas for my vehicle can't get kids to work unless they are just very young, so they rely on an all girl crew...between the ages of 14 and 65 !!!

Small communities are having huge problems with drugs, smaller cities that were the retirement choice of many people are now growing so fast that the older people that chose to live there are afraid to drive downtown because of all the traffic !!!

Thankfully I live 10 miles from town and it isn't knocking at my door yet !!!

[cakadu]

sorry, I didn't finish the thought in my last post...what the rush for money is doing in both the short and the long term.

The labour shortage is critical and is only going to get worse over the next while. We have a huge number of "baby boomers" who will be retiring in the next 5 years or so and the succession issues that creates is mind-boggling. We have known for many years that this was coming, but not much was done in that regard.

Now we have the added challenge of keeping kids in school so that they have an education of some sort that they can draw on. Post-secondary education no longer means going to university or even to college to get a degree. It includes training in the trades.

It is my understanding that many parents are not supporting their kids going into the trades for a number of reasons. Many in fact still look down upon trades and look up to degree status. I can't tell you the number of law students that were looking to get an articling position in the past. It may not be the case today, but for a time I knew law students that had been out of school for 2 or more years and hadn't found an articling position. It is a necessary step in becoming a lawyer.

The lad's dad is pretty astute to advise him not to bite the hand that feeds him because things are not always what they seem to be.

Still, the onus is fast coming onto employers, particularly those who have traditionally not paid very well, to treat employees better in order to keep them. Oftentimes a job is not just about the money. Feeling valued and that you are a part of something bigger have a great deal to do with job satisfaction.

Let's face it, if you hate your job there is no amount of money that will make it worthwhile. That and the fact that life it too short to waste it doing something you hate.

[cowman]

Here is what I consider a typical story: A friend of mine(oil consultant) has two boys. The one graduated from high school, went up to Fort Mac and took the test to become a power engineer(steam ticket) at Syncrude. Got accepted and they put him to work/school for six months until he got his fourth class ticket, then a full time job. The next year he completed his third class ticket(right before Christmas). At Christmas I saw him at his Dads home and he told me he was making $76,000 and by next year would hopefully have his second class ticket and move up to $105,000! In the meantime he had bought a small three bedroom house for $336,000(Dad loaned him the down payment) and was renting out two rooms to guys he worked with...which was paying the mortgage!
His younger brother, who did not finish high school, moved up there last summer, and through family connections, got a job driving the big oil sands trucks...for $30 an hour. He gets all the work he wants and is staying with his brother(one of his renters)! Not too shabby for a couple of kids under twenty ?
Now personally, I figure the government should be putting money into education that really matters? And actually do we really need more lawyers and over educated government workers who produce paper? I would suggest the world just might be a better place if we took all the lawyers out in the woods and shot them? Just my opinion.
Oh...and by the way "Dad" is an old Manitoba farm boy who came to Alberta in the early seventies to work as a rough neck. He stills owns 6 quarters of land around Verdun.

[cowman]

cowman your friend's son would make in excess of $105,000 with a second class ticket working at the Joffre plant and wouldn't need to live in Fort Mac.
I have a son with a second class ticket and with his years of seniority working in petrochemical plants he is pulling in well in excess of $130,000, and works an hour out of Calgary.

All the big bucks in Fort Mac are gone just to maintain any decent standard of living.