THIS WEEK IN EDMONTON
- The final City Council meeting before summer break takes place this morning at 9:30 am. Council will discuss the snow and ice control strategy for the upcoming winter as well as non-compliance in relation to campaign disclosure statements from the 2021 municipal election. Council will give first reading to a new bylaw regarding single-use items. The bylaw will ban using single-use plastic shopping bags and polystyrene foam serviceware as well as require a minimum mandatory fee for any paper and new reusable shopping bags that are provided to customers. Should this meeting not conclude, it will continue Wednesday from 9:30 am to noon.
- On Tuesday, there will be a City Council Public Hearing at 1:30 pm to deal with a number of zoning amendments, changes to Area Structure Plans, and road closures.
- The City has created a new "Balance the Budget" tool to let Edmontonians create their own version of the City's budget by testing out increases and decreases in spending in areas like transit, fire and rescue, neighbourhood renewal, and more. Unfortunately, the tool lumps wasteful spending into big broad categories that also contain useful work, and it also won't accept more than a 10% cut to any City activity (even the ones that should be cut 100% as they're not the job of a municipality at all). It's not clear how the City expects to get useful feedback by limiting the feedback to only a very narrow window of what's "acceptable" to those currently in charge, and the tool feels more like a way of reinforcing the idea that the current system is the only one that can possibly work.
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