WEEKLY UPDATE - SEP 25
Welcome back to the Weekly Wrap Up! Last week was committee meetings at Edmonton City Council.
At Urban Planning, we heard a report on Standards for Public Infrastructure. It might sound dry, but it’s part of our review of how Edmonton builds new infrastructure so that we are creating safe roads and reducing traffic fatalities and injuries by design. Improving pedestrian and active transport user safety is one of the key priorities of the work, with things like curb cut-outs, raised crosswalks, and boulevards being promoted as standard design elements in road reconstruction.
We also heard a report on surface parking lots downtown that was truly shocking. There are 245 surface parking lots operating without permits in the heart of our city. We asked City staff to come back with other options to make sure they’re contributing fairly to downtown Edmonton. I’m interested in fees or fines that we could introduce to take away the competitive advantage of operating without a license, and tools to improve the appearance of the lots. I’m excited for more to come in Q1 next year.
Our 2023-2027 Budget was the first to include a carbon budget, and one of the small but important updates last week was that we are going to be including climate impacts as a category on more Council reports so that this is included more directly in our decision making process.
At Executive Committee, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Rapid Housing Initiative Round 3 investments came to committee. We’ll see 74 more units of affordable housing built thanks to partnerships between CMHC, the Province, City of Edmonton, and agencies. I’m grateful to see these much needed units moving forward.
We were also talking transit and what tools we have available to ensure that transit service can continue to grow sustainably with Edmonton’s population and meet the needs of transit users current and future. The analysis showed we need to make considerable investments to keep pace with population. The return on investment in transit is huge and I look forward to the further work that staff will be bringing back to committee in the new year.
Executive Committee also decided to recommend holding off on opening the Blatchford Gates LRT station. It makes sense to wait until development reaches the station, and in the meantime, Blatchford residents will be able to access the new NAIT LRT station by the end of this year!
That’s all for the weekly wrap up! See you next week.
