Edmonton City Council: the Bunglers' Club

I really can’t figure out Edmonton’s city council. They just seem hell-bent on fucking up every decision, big or small.

I read in the Edmonton Journal yesterday that city council has allowed a ten-year contract to a bike rack provider to lapse. So now numerous bike racks are being removed from downtown and Whyte Ave. with no word on when they’ll be replaced. And this happens during the council’s declared Bike Month – a sign for which I pass every single day. Oh, the irony!

It’s almost impossible to count the number of city council failings. They are legion. Let me recall some of the past fifteen years’ highlights:

1. Winston Churchill Square. Council spent millions turning a pleasant, leafy square into a cement hellhole that in summer, reflects the glare of the sun and induces heatstroke. On the very day it opened, the cement was already cracked in many places.

2. South Edmonton Common. Whew! Where to begin? Council approved one of Edmonton’s largest retail developments mere blocks away from an existing retail development – Heritage Mall. In the process, killed the mall, and ensured that traffic at 23rd Ave and Calgary trail got ten times worse. Council now says it will cost $250 million or so building an interchange there. Why wasn’t this interchange built ten years ago? Come to think of it, why didn’t council think of this BEFORE approving South Edmonton Common?

3. Approving licenses to seemingly any new proposed bar on Whyte that wants one. What’s giving the city its biggest PR problem now? Violence and drunken shit-storms on Whyte. Congrats again council. You could’ve learnt a lesson from Calgary’s Electric Ave on this one. But I guess learning lessons isn’t what you get paid the big bucks for!

4. Seven or so new schools for Edmonton were just announced by the provincial government. Great. That’s roughly equal to the number of schools that city council has stood by and watch get closed down in the last decade – some of which were in the very same neighbourhoods that Mayor Mandel now wants to revitalize. Boy. Before approving developments in massive suburban sprawl areas – the very areas now needing schools – why didn’t we try finding a way to get families to live next to the schools that were already built? Could it be councillors are lazy? Stupid? Or in the pocket of big buck$$ developers! Or all three?

5. No new LRT station in ten years. Ten years during which the cost of financing infrastructure projects were half what they are now. There’s no excuse for this kind of backwards thinking. A wake-up call might have come in 1996-97, thereabouts, when deals were inked for multi-billion dollar projects up in the tar-sands, for which Edmonton is the major hub. But council, in its wisdom, decided to do nothing to prepare for the massive economic growth. On this one, they clearly followed the lead of the provincial Tory government.

Well, that’s enough for now! In other news, there has been some beautiful weather lately and soccer yesterday was great. I didn’t totally embarrass myself. Hoorah!