The press conference is currently ongoing, but according to a tweet by CBC reporter Dean Gutheil, the RM of Sherwood is in the process of announcing plans to establish a 14,000 resident community called Wascana Village on a 736 acre parcel of land located one kilometre south of the SIAST campus on the south end of Regina. The bedroom community would have two elementary schools, one high school, some affordable housing for post-secondary students, and some commercial amenities.
This comes on the heels of the City of Regina angling to annex land from the rural municipality to be in a better position to regulate the pace and nature of development on the city’s outskirts.
Also, at the conclusion of the RM press conference, a company called Great Prairie Development is supposed to be having a press conference of its own to announce a project tied to the RM’s plans for Wascan Village.
We’ll have more on this story later today.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to a CBC article on the proposed bedroom community. In comment threads on a couple of websites I’ve visited that have discussion of this idea concern has been expressed about issues like (i) the quality of land south of the city as far as it being prone to flooding and general saturation (ii) possible conflict of interest within the RM where elected officials who are touting the development may own land in the development area (iii) the close proximity of the development to the bypass that the province/city is planning to build to the south-east of the city to reroute traffic between #1 Hwy East and the Global Transportation Hub (iv) the problem of free-riding where people live outside of a municipality to avoid paying municipal taxes, then parasitically rely on services that exist within city limits that are paid for by city residents (v) the general problem of urban sprawl and adding massively to the amount of infrastructure that we rely on to support a relatively small population.