Lethbridge Minute: Issue 293

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

📅 This Week In Lethbridge: 📅

• City Council meets tomorrow at 12:30 pm. On the consent agenda is confirmation that Lethbridge will receive $2,004,800 under the provincial Policing Support Grant for the 2026-27 fiscal year. Deputy Premier and Public Safety and Emergency Services Minister Mike Ellis wrote to Mayor Blaine Hyggen on August 31st to confirm the allocation, which is calculated from the Province's 2023 population list and is meant to cover police service delivery, police governance and oversight, provincial policing priorities, and enhanced local policing. The conditional grant agreement runs from April 1st, 2026 to March 31st, 2027. A second letter in the same package has Hyggen writing to the same Minister in support of the Lethbridge Police Service's request for $231,000 in bridge funding to sustain its Integrated Offender Management Program through 2028. Council's letter tells the Minister that community safety remains one of its highest priorities.
  
  
• Council will hold a public hearing tomorrow at 3:00 pm on a land use change that would let a former medical office at 1902 9 Avenue South, across from Chinook Regional Hospital, go back to residential use with as many as three dwelling units. Since 1996 the property has been governed by a direct control district allowing only three uses: an accessory building, a medical office with a maximum of two specialists, and a single-family residence. The applicant wants to return the building to a single detached dwelling and add a basement suite, with the possibility of a garage suite later. The replacement district would keep the medical office as an allowable use, cap the parcel at three dwelling units, bar residential and medical uses from operating in the same building at once, and require the property to keep its low-density residential appearance. Administration circulated the application to City departments and reports no transportation or servicing concerns, and 23 notices went to nearby property owners along with newspaper advertisements on July 25th and August 1st.
  
  
• Also coming to Council tomorrow is an updated report on the downtown protected bike lanes, forwarded by the Community Issues Committee on a unanimous 8-0 vote in July. The report says cycling accounted for as much as 3.6% of trips on the 4 Avenue South and 7 Street South corridors in summer, against 1.3% in the previous household travel survey, with daily bike counts on 4 Avenue South running from 125 to 160 while average daily motor vehicle traffic there was 5,500. Maintenance cost $26,600 in 2024 and about $41,500 in 2025, paid from existing operating accounts. The lanes cost 6 parking stalls on 4 Avenue South and 22 on 7 Street South, and the City says it has added or restored 11 stalls since May 2025 and pulled precast lane blocks away from another 58. What is new is the Committee's direction that Administration come back by the end of the first quarter of 2027 with comparisons to similar-sized communities in Alberta and Canada, links to the parking surveys the report cites, the full record of past Council decisions on bike lanes, and a statement of what service level would count as success.
  
  
• Mayor Blaine Hyggen has filed a formal Council inquiry asking where the Councillor Accountability Frameworks being developed by the Province now stand, and what matters they are expected to address. The frameworks, which the inquiry notes were formerly called codes of conduct, would set the rules governing how Councillors across Alberta are held to account. Administration's written response says the question will be answered at the September 29th Council meeting rather than tomorrow.
  
  
• The Government of Alberta has committed $320 million to redevelop the cardiac catheterization lab at Chinook Regional Hospital and expand the hospital's intensive care and cardiac care units. The announcement, made in Lethbridge on September 2nd, would take the intensive care unit from 16 bed spaces to 26 and the cardiac care unit from 4 beds to 28, for a total of 54. Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf said he was proud the government was able to fund the project after many years. Design work starts this month, construction is scheduled to begin in October 2027, and completion is expected by the end of 2031, with the Province releasing the money in stages through its annual budgets. Chinook Regional Hospital Foundation Chief Executive Officer Crystal Elliott says the foundation's Bringing Hearts Home campaign, launched in September 2024 with a target of $30 million in 30 months, has now raised more than $32 million, and that donations are still being accepted to press for a full cardiac centre in Lethbridge.

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