Edmonton Minute: Carbon Neutrality, COVID Rules, and a Giant Sinkhole But Not At City Hall For Once

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

This Week In Edmonton:

• Heading into the Easter holiday, City Hall will be quiet this week. The only scheduled meeting is the Agenda Review Committee at 9:00 am on Tuesday. Council will return on April 6th, with a whopping 35-item agenda to make up for the break!
  
  
• Work has resumed at the giant sinkhole that opened up at the intersection of 109 Street and 61 Avenue last year, but work is not expected to be completed until at least July. If you're wondering why the repairs will take so long, or why we're even writing about a hole, you may not realize quite how big it is. The hole is 23 meters deep (that's more than 75 feet!) and a custom pipe had to be ordered from the United Arab Emirates for the repairs. Now we just have to deal with the giant void at City Hall!
  
  
• The provincial government is moving forward with a plan to turn 68 hectares of crown land on the border of Edmonton and the Enoch Reserve into a provincial park. The park's target date for opening is 2023, but the Province will first spend $300,000 on an ecological assessment and a traditional land-use study.

Last Week In Edmonton:

• On Monday, the Province announced Alberta would not be moving to Step 3 of the government's reopening plan, despite the Province being below the 300 hospitalizations threshold required for Step 3 for quite some time. The Province cited the spread of variants as their justification, and have since suggested that restrictions may even have to be increased again. It's true that since the announcement cases have risen slightly, but hospitalization numbers have actually dropped. When are we going to start following the actual data, rather than models and predictions? If you haven't signed our petition to Reopen Edmonton yet, you can do so here.
  
  
• A new report showed that academic achievement is down in many areas of the Edmonton Public School Board over the last 5 years of data, including both literacy and numeracy. Perhaps even more concerning, the data only goes to the end of the 2018-19 year, so this problem pre-dates COVID. Who knows what the data will look like in another couple of years.
  
  
• The City released its "Revised Community Energy Transition Strategy" which contains a goal of making Edmonton carbon-neutral by 2050. City Staff estimate this would require an astounding $42 billion dollars in public and private investment over the next 30 or so years. We plan on briefing you on the entire 175-page report when we get a chance, but maybe the City could spend some time considering how they could be revenue-neutral for once?

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