Weekly Update - May 27th, 2022

It’s amazing how much can happen in just four days.

The week started off with a powerful and important conversation about safety with members of the Chinatown community at Council. Further discussions with community members on Wednesday have resulted in clear 30 day, 60 day, and longer term action plans that focus on and further fund a number of initiatives underway.

This existing work, along with a range of other ongoing downtown safety initiatives, positioned us well to respond to the request for a safety plan made by Justice Minister Shandro on Thursday. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to highlight the work that the City is doing on this critical issue and identify the areas where we can further partner with the Province to meet our shared objectives of a safe and healthy heart of our city.

We also passed our new Community Safety and Wellbeing Strategy that will help strengthen communities across Edmonton, and we’ll be picking up the conversation on the approach to funding Edmonton Police Service on June 7th - more to come!

On Wednesday, we passed two rezonings in O-day’min to allow a mixed use commercial building on 124th Street and small scale row houses in Queen Mary Park. I’m excited to see these new homes and businesses in our community!

On Thursday, I was pleased to take part in a panel conversation held by NAIOP Edmonton along with representatives from the business community and Edmonton Police Service to talk about downtown revitalization. The importance of working together was a major theme coming out of the discussion and I look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners in Edmonton’s downtown rebound.

I also had the opportunity to be out and about, including a very exciting groundbreaking on the Valley Line West LRT line (yay!), a fantastic visit to the Alberta Aviation Museum (which also led to me seeing the amazing progress at the Prince Rupert Community playpark!), a sneak peak of the gorgeously redone Pendennis Hotel, celebrating AI Week at Amii - Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute AMIIVersary party, and a quick glimpse of Edmonton Downtown Business Association’s amazing Downtown Spark Festival - can’t wait to see more and encourage everyone to check it out before June 5th!

Here’s to a restful weekend to all, see you next week.