Saint-Colomban’s Local Agenda 21, for a Healthy and Sustainable Community

The Municipality of Saint-Colomban continued to develop its sustainable development strategic plan entitled Local Agenda 21 — created in 2006 with the support of the Réseau québécois des Villes et Villages en santé (Quebec Network of Healthy Cities and Villages). It had already established goals and objectives for its action plan, and now wanted to set indicators and design the implementation and follow-up stages for its three-year action plan, including annual planning for actions, the distribution of roles and responsibilities and ways to measure performance. It also planned to hold consultation, promotional, training and awareness-building activities with both the community and elected officials and municipal department heads. This involved drafting a preliminary action plan to be presented to residents for discussion and creating an action committee to define the interventions, targets and indicators that would be included in the plan. The Saint-Colomban sustainable development plan aimed to cover all the municipality’s action and intervention policies, such as its cultural policy, and was expected to promote integration of the work done by municipal departments such as planning, transportation, protection of the natural environment, water, soil and residual matter. The plan would allow the municipality to deal with environmental issues based on economic and social factors, with a long-term development perspective, and with democratic openness. A central component of this initiative was the participation of residents.