Lacombe County Council has denied a request from a residential community on the west shores of Sylvan Lake to install a security gate that would restrict night time access to Westside Country Estates.

Residents in the rural lakefront subdivision have been experiencing property theft, and they feel a gate may provide a deterrent to thieves.

Lacombe County currently has no policy that would allow for blocking off a road allowance, and as Reeve Paula Law explains, they felt allowing the gate may create more issues.

“The main concern was from the County’s perspective with the number of road allowances we would have we felt this would open up a whole lot of other issues or a lot more requests and would we be able to accommodate all of them. The other thing brought up was closing a gate at night, if it’s open during the day that’s great but crime also happens during the day too so we weren’t sure if this was going to resolve the issue”.

The County also felt it would raise concerns around access for emergency services, it may hamper current public access to the lake and may even impact snowplowing in the winter, limiting crews to daylight access.

County Council addressed several items on their agenda yesterday dealing with the issue of rising rural crime rates.

Law says they're not alone in hearing more and more concerns from their ratepayers.

“This issue is all over Alberta. We were up at the AAMDC conference last week and we heard loud and clear that rural crime is all over in the rural areas. We’re trying to work on ways to, what we can do to help ourselves, what we can do to help the RCMP out; it’s just kind of working together”.