Edmonton Minute: Free Parking, Subsidised Flights, and Antiquated Waste Collection

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

This Week In Edmonton:

• There are no Council or committee meetings this week as City Council are on a break for summer. The next meeting will be an Agenda Review Committee on July 27th. Here at Common Sense Edmonton, we'll be using the break to catch up on mountains of City Reports we've yet to have a chance to read through. How about you?
  
  
• The City is hoping its waste collection returns to normal this week after it emerged that over 13,000 houses were missed last week. Edmonton has been rolling out new compost and waste bins all summer to update its antiquated waste collection program.
  
  
• The City of Edmonton is asking for proposals for bus cleaning and refuelling contractors after Council actually decided to look at making some modest savings. The City estimates that privatizing bus cleaning and refuelling could save about $1.2 million a year.

Last Week In Edmonton:

• City Council voted against implementing paid parking at some City parks and sites. They had been originally considering introducing paid parking from next spring at Emily Murphy Park, Rafter’s Landing, Muttart Conservatory, Fort Edmonton Park, and TELUS World of Science.
  
  
• Edmonton Global was successful in its bid to raise $15 million from the City of Edmonton and neighbouring community taxpayers to subsidize airline routes to and from Edmonton. If you haven’t checked out our excellent article on this issue, and how this is a raw deal for taxpayers, you can find it here. Even more scarily for taxpayers, the partner organizations are seeking further contributions from other stakeholders, including the provincial government. What's worse than paying one tax to fund corporate welfare? Paying two or three!
  
  
• The federal government announced Edmonton will receive some $14.9 million to build another 68 units of public housing in the City. Edmonton's new goal is to build 600 units of housing by the end of 2022 after an earlier application to build 480 units at the cost of $68.8 million was rejected, ostensibly because the provincial government didn't support that plan.

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