Lethbridge Minute: Grasshopper Infestation, Airport Upgrades, and a Clean Energy Program

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

This Week In Lethbridge:

• It's going to be another reasonably slow week at Council with only two meetings scheduled this week.
  
  
• At Tuesday's regular City Council Meeting scheduled for 12:30 pm, Council will open their meeting in secret discussing a number of issues pertaining to Lethbridge Land and their Banking strategy. When the meeting opens to the public at 1:30 pm, Council will discuss directed resolutions, a number of land-use bylaws, borrowing bylaws for water treatment upgrades, the status of the grasshopper infestation in the City, and the option of voting online in the next municipal election.
  
  
• Later in the afternoon, at 4:00 pm, is a Public Hearing which will receive presentations on a couple of land-use bylaws regarding construction on 24th Avenue South and on a complicated Clean Energy Improvement Program, which purports to create jobs by letting property owners apply for clean energy upgrades and charging those upgrades to their property taxes.

Last Week In Lethbridge:

• Ottawa's Regional Air Transportation Initiative announced a grant worth $583,480 for Lethbridge Airport. As Council is eyeing the viability of taking full ownership of the airport, this could come as welcome news to the City, but what about taxpayers?. Air travel was a notoriously volatile industry even without a pandemic, so should the City really be getting taxpayers involved in yet another risky business? 
  
  
• Federal Economic Development Minister Melanie Joly has announced a Prairies Economic Development Canada service location in Lethbridge. The federal government says the rolling out of these seven new service locations across the Prairies will help them allocate development spending with better local knowledge.
  
  
• After cutting the Parks budget, Council is now urging citizens who own pets to exercise caution due to the entirely preventable uptick in foxtail grass sprouting in public parks. In other words, cutting the Parks budget but not cutting the grass led to pet owners having to exercise caution instead of exercising their dogs. It's interesting that Council cited advice from the recent KPMG report as justification for these cuts, but completely ignored KPMG's advice to also cut the 2nd and 3rd pensions of City staff...

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