Council for the Rural Municipality of Tache is expected to give final reading to its new Zoning Bylaw today.

Mayor Robert Rivard says because council has been in the process of redoing its Zoning Bylaw, there has been considerably less construction in the municipality this year over last year. Through the first six months of 2018, there was a little more than $8.5 million worth of construction. Compare that to $11 million during the same period a year ago.

(Tache Mayor Robert Rivard)"We've been encouraging people that if they don't need to do their building right away, to wait until the new Zoning Bylaw is in place," explains Rivard. "So we don't get people caught applying under the old Zoning Bylaw and then we have to approve it under the new one."

For that reason, Rivard says they knew this year was going to be slower than normal. And, he says this isn't negative for Tache.

"We've got developers that are just waiting to get things going and a lot of private subdivisions and lots that have been started in the process so we've asked them to hold off just a little bit until we can get everything in place so that it falls under the one system," he says.

Rivard says he expects the second half of 2018 will have more activity than the first half, and he hopes this will carry over into 2019.

Most of the development thus far in 2018 has been happening in the rural area on the west side of the municipality. Rivard says in a perfect world they would see development taking place largely in their urban centres, in order to protect as much agricultural land as possible. He notes over the last number of years about 60 per cent of development is happening in their urban centres.