Edmonton Minute: Budget Adjustments, Economic Inaction, and Low Vaccine Uptake

Edmonton Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Edmonton politics

This Week In Edmonton:

• It's another busy week at City Hall with a 9:30 am Monday meeting of City Council. Council will consider 29 agenda items, including the Spring Supplemental Budget Adjustment and a report on electric buses. Did you know that an electric bus costs about $700,000 more to purchase than a diesel bus?
  
  
• On Tuesday, the Agenda Review Committee meets at 9:00 am, followed by a Council Services Committee meeting at 9:30 am which will discuss amendments to the City Councillors' budget and expenses policy. At 1:30 pm there will be a City Council Public Hearing on 23 different zoning amendments. Sounds fun!
  
  
• Finally on Wednesday, should the City Council not conclude on Monday, they will continue their agenda at 9:30 am. At 1:30 pm there will be a City Auditor Recruitment Committee meeting. This meeting will be in-camera because it involves an update from recruitment consultants. We're excited to see who eventually gets picked for the job and, of course, to read and report on how they think we can improve our city.

Last Week In Edmonton:

• The City announced an Edmonton Economic Action Plan which involves (allegedly) creating 121,000 jobs and making Edmonton a better place to do business. The City has set 5 overarching outcomes they will aim to achieve and last year they failed on at least 3 of the 5. These include "Edmonton's economy grows" (it shrank), "non-residential property values increased" (they didn't), and "new business openings increased" (they decreased). Darn. We'll have more on this plan in future, as the City is already planning some revisions to the plan.
  
  
• The City also announced that they would be consulting the public on a proposed footbridge in the far northeast corner of the City, east of the Horse Hill neighbourhood. This bridge would connect the Horse Hill neighbourhood and a couple of golf courses in Edmonton on one side of the North Saskatchewan River to Strathcona County and another golf course on the other side. No cost for the proposed bridge is available at the moment.
  
  
• Finally, uptake was low amongst eligible 55-to-64-year-old Edmontonians as the first mass vaccination clinic opened up in the City last week. Instead of administering the maximum capacity of 7,000 shots per day, on Wednesday the site did only 280 shots. This clinic is exclusively offering the AstraZeneca vaccine which has been linked to very rare blood clots, and this is thought to be at least one factor in the lower-than-expected uptake.

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