Q&A: New Stettler Mayor-Elect Gord Lawlor

After serving two terms on Stettler Town Council, Gord Lawlor is stepping into the mayor’s chair following the October 2025 municipal election. Lawlor succeeds outgoing Mayor Sean Nolls, who chose not to run for re-election.

A familiar face in the community, Lawlor operated Lawlor’s Jewelry before passing the business to his son, and has been a strong voice for library funding.

Hometown Productions & Media’s Landin Chambers sat down with Mayor-elect Gord Lawlor to talk about his experience, priorities, and vision for the next four years.

Chambers: First off, how’s it going, Gord?

Lawlor: “It’s going really well. I’m a lot more relaxed than I was last week. But it’s an opportunity for me to spend the next four years growing and moving forward with our community.

I also recognize that, you know, the vote split that was there, Dean had some very, very positive things that he was bringing to the table. My ears are wide open to listen to people and hear what everyone has to say, not just my views.“

Chambers: So, tell me a little bit about your first term as a counselor there. (2017-2021) Tell me what you learned in that first term. 

Lawlor: “Year one: learning curve. Year two: learning curve. Year three and four it started to balance off to the stage where I understood the budget numbers & I understood the agreements that we had with our county partners & I was beginning to get it.

Then the term was over. So I ran for 2021 because I had so many things going on that I still wanted to finish.“

Chambers: You really get an idea of just how the town works when you’re sitting on all these committees and like you said, starting to get your feet wet and understanding how this all works? 

Lawlor: Very much so. I would say it was probably term two. I sat on the library board and the regional library board and the union negotiating committee. All of the committees I’m on, I’ve sat on for all eight years. There’s a perspective of changing it up, change your people on different committees, which is good.

It brings fresh blood to different committees, but having an intimate understanding of them is huge. So I became literally the library guy to municipal affairs minister Rick McIver before he got to wear the funny hat as Speaker of the House. 

That’s turned into a resolution that I’ll be taking to the floor of the Alberta municipalities of predictable, stable, increased library funding for the province. That resolution will be seconded by the City of Calgary, because the CEO of Calgary Public Libraries reached out to Regional and said, “I understand the library guy is on your board.“

Mission accomplished.

Chambers: It’s really about that advocacy and I’m sure you’ve heard from the library that they just want stable funding year to year.

Lawlor: Absolutely. There’s probably about 30% of libraries in the province that work on deficit funding and there’s different perspectives. Our council has always been very very supportive, as has our county council of library funding. 

It’s always sometimes hard to find the money. There’s no question. But the reality of it is we recognize the importance of the library for everyone in our community, including the most vulnerable. It’s a safe place to be, and a very accepting place to be. 

But libraries in general are a lifeline. Every community’s got one. If we, God forbid, if we ever experience another COVID, if the province has to do a mass distribution of PPE or or vaccinations, libraries, go to the eight regional library systems and they’ll distribute up to the individual libraries to villages and hamlets. It really is quite the system there.

Chambers: So last term, the council saw some emerging issues such as the doctor shortage. Could you talk about how this was dealt with and the role of council in this?

Lawlor: Sure. it was very much an issue, I don’t want to say push back from AHS, but we it was a cooperation factor. You need to go out and research and find and advocate and acquire doctors. How do you do that? You just don’t Google it.

I have to give Dean Lovell, Terry Cheslea and the team that they put together for Stettler Needs Doctors. Raising awareness. There’s a Stettler Needs Doctors sign still on Highway 56 that every time I drive by it. 

Raising awareness, the county council and town council got together for a couple of joint meetings on what to do, how to do it, do we hire a consultant?

How do we functionally communicate with AHS, the college of physicians and surgeons, all of the various different facets of that to accomplish this task.

Ultimately the collaboration of the Stettler Needs Doctors committee, the health professionals attraction retention committee and county and town council being funding partners as well. 

That’s what made it happen. 4% of the 6% tax increase in town last year was doctor incentive related and that’s unfortunately a reality, but that’s already now budgeted.

So there’s not going to be new spends for doctors, no circumstances with healthcare providers that is going to affect taxes.

Chambers: So that was a really good example of town and county working together over the last year. But like any partnership, there’s going to be some issues and have been some issues concerning the fire department. 

We have the County of Stettler now separating, starting the Heartland Regional Fire Commission. Tell me about the timeline how we got here on this issue.

Lawlor: This one’s a tricky one because there’s a he said, she said. I want to simplify it because I like to try to keep things on a basis that I can fully understand them. It’s a divorce. It’s a divorce that was not inevitable, but it ultimately came to a divorce. 

Then the well-meaning friends and the lawyers got involved, and then just things got rough. Our needs for the town, the county’s needs for the county are different. 

We deal with structure fires that are two and half to four hours long. We have a level three pressurized water system and the apparatus to operate that system. So, it helps us with our house insurance in the sense of fire. 

When I was talking with some county residents, what do you pay for fire insurance? Holy man, but they’re 15, 20, 30 kilometers away from a fire hall. That affects their fire insurance. 

So the the split I don’t want to say it was necessary, but it’s become something that’s happened. December 31st is going to be the official date where we are separate fire departments. 

But the county’s apparatus that they own and need for grass fires, that type of thing, has been moved to the new Heartland Fire Commission’s facility. 

Now we’re working on inventory. We’re working on joint assets, assets we bought, assets they bought.  We’re working on the details. We’re finalizing all of that. 

It’s a matter of basically who gets the house, who gets the dog, who gets the car.

Read More: Gord Lawlor Elected Mayor of Stettler

Chambers: What are your top priorities for this term and what did you hear from voters over the last month?

Lawlor: I heard from the voters questions about fire. A lot of questions about fire, and that’s hard because that’s become a topic that’s overrun the election. That’s okay. The election is done. Let’s move forward. 

I heard about housing. We have like a 0.5% vacancy rate for rental properties. We need to get purpose-built rental properties in our community. I was having a conversation with a fellow who’s a bit of a developer in my business here a little earlier. He had some really interesting perspectives. 

I’m a brand new mayor-elect. I’m not pretending like I know all this stuff about all this stuff. My learning curve now is this again. He and I talked at great length about two duplexes. That’s a great idea. I know the property, it’s a nice size property. What about two fourplexes?

Then we started talking about fire response times, the distance for the property line, how close houses can be to each other based on fire response and that type of thing. What has been our response rate? 

Say in the last two years or four years, what’s been the timeline? Does it impact what he could build on that property? Now, we can maybe talk about eight units? It was a spitball conversation that may go nowhere, or it may turn into eight units.

Chambers: It’s interesting how you kind of take a step back and you see how all these issues kind of affect each other, right?

Lawlor: So, every cog has a number of teeth in the cog and they all have to come together and smoothly. If one gets bent, they can throw a kink into it. 

Going back to our relationship with the county, Wayne Nixon & Dick Richards historically brought the fractured relationship to really, a beautiful place. My first term on council. Dick had retired, Sean became our mayor, but that relationship was very solid. 

We have that mutual desire. I have spoken with county counselors and our previous Reeve, current Reeve, future Reeve, about communication, collaboration, relationship.

All three, and not necessarily in that order, are huge right now for us to get ourselves back into where we should be as siblings, who share the same space, but respect each other’s space, respect that we’re different. 

We have a binder this thick of multiple agreements that the county and town have, the library, the museum, the airport there’s so many of them in there, that they work well.

Chambers: There really has to be collaboration between you two with how much you two have to uh to look after like you said the airport the the water systems, you name it right?

We touched a little bit on the housing builds & the developers incentive that was brought to council in recent weeks. Is that something you would look to expand in the next four years?

Lawlor: You know, we were in a position that the MGA, the municipal government act, the province changed the rules that we could provide property tax incentives, meaning delayed property taxes for the developers.

Somebody builds purpose-built rental property, they build an apartment building, they build a duplex, a fourplex, they build something with the intention of it being rented.  To help our rental housing shortage, their property taxes are delayed. 

So the town, I guess you could take one stance, the town loses money on property tax not coming in. The other, the town gets builds, the town’s income from the property taxes gets delayed, but it builds a property that we will get property tax on where there was nothing on that property to begin with. 

So I would like to see us look at all different ideas. Think outside the box. Look at different communities. Drumheller apparently has a number of houses being built. Let’s find out. Let’s ask them how come, why? Help me understand. 

What do you do that’s different than we do? And that’s where our doctor’s circumstance came in. Many communities were checked out, finding out what different ones did. And like always, a Made in Stettler solution.

Chambers: I really think that’s what we’re going to see in the coming years, especially with both the provincial and federal government looking at budget cuts. We’re going to need to see more regional and local collaboration between your Camroses, your Drumhellers, and creating these economic corridors. 

Lawlor: So, I think it’s a combination of thinking outside the box and looking beyond. We’re very similar in size to Ponoka. We’re very similar in size to Innisfail, but they’re probably a little larger, but there’s many different communities of our size. Rocky Mountain House, for example.

I’ve become friendly with the now mayor of Rocky Mountain House. We share the same hairline. We have matching hearing aids. You know we’re just two people that really find each other amusing. 

But I’ve learned so much from what they do, that’s different from what we do with the same problem.

Let’s learn from each other. How are you fixing the brakes on your car as opposed to how they fix the brakes in their car, which is the best way for me to fix the brakes on my car?

Chambers: Well, thanks for sitting down with us today. Is there anything else you just wanted to say before you go?

Lawlor: “I just want to say thank you. I’m really proud of what you and Alex have done with this media business. Our town needs it, people need to hear from different parts of the community, not just council, but definitely council too.“

Chambers: No, at the end of the day, you make decisions that affect all of us.

Lawlor: “And ourselves. One of the things I want to remind residents of is that if we make a property tax decision, we make it very carefully. We debate the daylights out of things.

So, I’ve heard a negative comment about our unanimous votes. Well, we come out of the room as friends, but we come out of the room with an answer. Anything that we do with property tax affects us as well.“

Lawlor and the newly elected Stettler town council will be officially sworn in during the town’s organizational meeting on Monday, Oct. 28.