Red Deer Minute: Entertainment District, Meeting Times, and No Additional EMS

Red Deer Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Red Deer politics

This Week In Red Deer:

• There are two meetings scheduled for this week, starting with a City Council meeting today. For some unknown reason, though, there is still no agenda - or even a start time - for the meeting available on the City's website.
  
  
• On Tuesday, there will be a meeting of the Housing and Homelessness Integration Committee at 5:00 pm. At this meeting, the Committee will receive a Housing and Homelessness Supports Section Report and a Housing Asset Development Sub-Committee Report.
  
  
• On Wednesday, there will be a meeting of the Housing Asset Development Sub-Committee at 5:15 pm. At this meeting, the Committee is set to receive a report on the community engagement process regarding municipally-owned social housing sites. The report anticipates that the community engagement process will take place in the months of June and July.

Last Week In Red Deer:

• At last week's meeting, City Council gave the initial thumbs up for the Ross Street Patio to be set up as an Entertainment District, which would designate the area as a public place where adults could consume alcohol. Councillor Bruce Buruma voiced concern over the possibility of some residents drinking at the Cenotaph, but was reassured that the bylaw would explicitly exclude the area. Council will give final approval to the bylaw on June 20th.
  
  
• Council opted to change its official meeting start times from 12:30 pm to 10:30 am for all future City Council meetings beginning June 20th. Mayor Ken Johnston says the move comes in an effort to save money and improve staff well-being by ensuring that meetings don’t run over time. However, Councillor Vesna Hingham says earlier start time will give Councillors less opportunity to digest “hefty” agendas. Couldn't the City just start publishing the agendas earlier, though? That's something we've been pushing for a long time.
  
  
• The Province announced the creation of 60 new EMS positions across Alberta. Unfortunately, it did not include any in Red Deer, despite surgeries being diverted from the city for over a month. The news adds insult to injury considering the widely circulated images of 14 ambulances lined up outside of Red Deer hospital a few weeks ago while staff inside struggled to deal with the influx of patients.

-----

Donate:

Common Sense Red Deer doesn't accept any government funding and never will. We think you should be free to choose, for yourself, which organizations to support. If you're in a position to contribute financially, you can make a donation here.

-----

Share:

If you're not in a position to donate, we understand, but if you appreciate our work, you can help by spreading our message. Please email this post to your friends, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and help make sure every Red Deerian knows what's really going on at City Hall.