Edmonton Minute: Masks Removed, Meetings Galore, and Code Of Conduct Concerns

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

This Week In Edmonton:

• It’s a full week at City Hall, starting with a City Council meeting this morning at 9:30 am. There’s a large agenda, including both an operating and capital financial update. Edmonton is also proposing it be allowed to levy a special tax to replace alley lighting. How do we not have money for street lamps when our operational budget is $3 billion dollars?
  
  
• Tuesday, at 9:30 am, the City Manager and City Auditor Performance Evaluation Committee will meet to receive a consultant's update. Afterwards, at 1:30 pm, there will be a City Council Public Hearing to discuss the usual zoning amendments. City Council will continue on Wednesday at 9:30 am should it not conclude on Monday. Finally, on Wednesday at 1:30 pm, there will be a non-regular meeting of the Community and Public Services Committee to discuss appointments to various boards and commissions.
  
  
• On Thursday, the Urban Planning Committee is set to meet at 9:30 am to discuss memberships of boards and commissions. On Friday, there are three meetings. At 9:30 am, the Audit Committee will present a few audits, after which the Audit Selection Committee will meet from 11:30 am to 12:00 pm to discuss Audit Committee membership and recruitment, and finally, there will be a non-regular meeting of the Executive Committee to discuss appointments to its boards and commissions.

Last Week In Edmonton:

• In a major victory for Common Sense Edmonton and all Edmontonians, Edmonton City Council lifted its mask mandate. While the provincial health order requiring masks on public transit remains, it is due to be dropped soon, and the City plans to be ready with draft bylaws to submit in order to keep these restrictions going. Thank you to each and every one of our readers who took the time to fill out the City’s survey on masks. A higher response rate was recorded by the City on this survey than usual and we know our followers helped with that.
  
  
• We hosted our second-ever get-together at the Transit Smokehouse & BBQ, and an awesome time was had by all. Thank you to each and every one of you that attended. It was great to finally meet some of our supporters and even a former City Councillor. Hopefully, as long as things don’t conspire against us, as they did last year, we will be able to have more events soon, and we look forward to seeing you at them.
  
  
• It was alleged that a City staffer used the public bidding process to land contracts for their personal business. If you think, “Well, that seems wrong” it’s because it is. It goes against the City’s code of conduct. This issue will be discussed at the Audit Committee meeting mentioned above. Edmonton police say there’s no criminal investigation into the matter, and the City is not providing further details at this time.

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