Council debates farm safety program

By Cal Braid
Taber Times
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

At a Dec. 15 meeting, town council voiced differing opinions on a contribution to Heartland Training and Support Hub after it requested $500 in annual support from the Town. Heartland TSH, formerly Farm Safety Centre services, runs a Safety Smarts Program that serves Taber and the MD.

From 2016 to 2023, the Town made a yearly contribution of $500, but did not receive correspondence from the organization in 2024, and there was no contribution that year. After Heartland reconnected with the Town in late-2025, the administration recommended that if council chose to re-initiate the contribution, it should be made yearly so that the request need not be brought back to council every year.

 Coun. Sparks and Mayor Prokop were both on council in 2016, and neither remembered agreeing to an ongoing donation to the program. Sparks initiated a motion to simply receive the correspondence as information, but other councillors had opinions about its validity.

Coun. Firth said, “I think that while farm safety is a very noble cause and very important, I think this is a primarily rural initiative, and I don’t know that it’s necessarily something that the Town of Taber should be contributing to. Not that $500 is a huge amount of money, but just because we need to be responsible for taxpayers’ money. I would support the motion that Coun. Sparks made to accept it for information.”

However, Coun. Wiebe pointed to numbers that made the program relevant for the Town. “I agree that I would support it for information. But reading through the numbers, there were 735 youth in Taber and an additional 473 in the MD that did receive training through this, and as an agriculture community, I could see supporting it if council chose to do so.”

Coun. Sorensen made a valid point of her own. “I’m of the opposite opinion of council. Just because you go to school in Taber doesn’t mean that you don’t live rural or on a farm. Five-hundred dollars is fairly economical, and we could be saving an injury. So to me, I would almost support this and ongoing, future funding for it.”

Sparks’ motion to receive the request as information was carried, though not unanimously, and the status of the $500 yearly contribution remains up in the air.