Drumheller town council approved a paid parking pilot program this summer at the Hoodoo tourist site on Highway 10 to help offset maintenance and infrastructure costs there.

Details and specifics for the plan will be developed in the coming months, but ideas brought to council at their February 11 meeting by Director of Protective Services Greg Peters included hiring at least two summer staff to collect funds of either cash or debit/credit from each car parking there. He estimated the operating costs to be between $15,000 and $18,000, while CAO Darryl Drohomerski suggested revenues generated from the site, which welcomes over 200,000 visitors each year, would far exceed labour and startup costs. A parking fee of $2 per car was floated at the meeting, considering the amount of time an average visitor spends at the site. Google lists the average visitor time to be around 20 minutes.

It was estimated by CAO Drohomerski that refurbishing the washrooms and building a new, bigger parking lot would cost the town around $200,000.

“Certainly from everyone's perspective both of those are high priority concerns, safety concerns, especially with the big buses and motorhomes turning around, and aesthetically with the washrooms there,” said CAO Drohomerski at the meeting.

It was noted that the town does not have the authority to block access to a provincial site, which is free to access for all Albertans, but part of the staff’s job would be to inform visitors the fee is being used to maintain the washrooms and parking lot at the site. Visitors would be entitled to refuse to pay and still gain access to the site.

“It’s simply not going to happen that often. When people are presented with a nominal charge for a service they think has value, one-tenth of one percent is actually going to have the confrontational confidence to say ‘may I refuse,’ and at that point the answer should be ‘yes and on you go,’” said councillor Jay Garbutt at the meeting.

Mr. Peters said a traffic plan and a bylaw would be needed to manage traffic flows and give the town authority to collect funds.

The success of the Hoodoo site pilot will show whether the town will explore paid parking at other tourist sites such as the suspension bridge in Rosedale.

For the February 14 session of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology’s 2019 Speaker Series, Dr. Win McLaughlin (Oberlin College, Ohio) will present “Changing Landscapes, Climate, and Life in the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan.”

The high Tien Shan mountains that dominate Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia are some of the youngest mountains on Earth. Their extremely rapid uplift continues today, affecting humans with a high earthquake hazard. This ‘mountain-building’ has drastically impacted life and ecosystems over the past 10 million years. As recently as five million years ago, the Tien Shan mountains were semi-forested landscapes full of fantastic beasts such as tusked rhinos, spike-headed giraffes, and grizzly-bear-sized hyenas.

Dr. McLaughlin will discuss how ecosystems rapidly and drastically change, driving the evolution of modern cold-adapted organisms and ecological communities, as illustrated by the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series talks are free and open to the public. Presentations are given in the museum auditorium every Thursday at 11:00 a.m. until April 25. Speaker Series talks are also available on the Museum’s YouTube channel at: youtube.com/c/RoyalTyrrellMuseumofPalaeontology.