Lethbridge Minute: Limited Reopening, Mask Mandates, and Harm Reduction Controversy

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

This Week In Lethbridge:

• Starting today, restaurants and gyms will finally be able to reopen in Alberta, having been closed for in-person dining or working out since December 8th. While this tiny slice of good news is welcome, restaurants are still restricted to only members of the same household at each table, while gyms are only allowed to offer one-on-one training sessions - no individual or group fitness allowed.
  
  
• On Monday, there will be a City Council meeting from 1:30 pm, followed by a Public Hearing at 4.00 pm. Council will be debating a number of issues including Bylaw 6265, the Municipal Development Plan Adoption and Coal Mining.
  
  
• On Wednesday from 1:30 pm, there will be a meeting of the Economic Standing Policy Committee which will receive presentations on Transportation and Capital projects, while on Thursday, also from 1:30 pm, there will be a meeting of the Community Safety Standing Policy Committee where Council will debate whether to extending Bylaw 6239, the City's Temporary Mandatory Face Coverings Bylaw, until December 31st, 2021. The mask mandate was first introduced on August 24, 2020 and is currently set to expire on February 23, 2020.

Last Week In Lethbridge:

• Calgary-based HIV Community Link applied for a development permit for 422 13th St N for a potential harm reduction site. The proposal will have to go through the City's standard consultation process meaning the public will be able to submit on the plan.
  
  
• On a related note, Saamis Aboriginal Employment, the previous tenants of the building are now scrambling to find a new location. Their lease had been extended from October 2020 to March 2021, but only just found out it had been leased to HIV Community Link.
  
  
• Mayor Spearman, along with the Mayor's of Calgary, Red Deer, and Wood Buffalo, called for an inquiry into failings of the new centralized dispatch service after several incidents emerged in January. The Mayor's claim that the service was unavailable for more than an hour on January 26th, which the Province doesn't dispute, but the Province pointed out that the issue with the service was nothing to do with the centralization efforts, and the outage was handled in the same way other technical issues are always handled and that no urgent dispatchers were affected.

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