Red Deer Minute: ICU Capacity, Museum Anniversary, and Molly Bannister Drive

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

This Week In Red Deer:

• There will be a City Council meeting this morning at 10:30 am. The first items on the agenda, a permanent shelter update and a union update, will be discussed in-camera. At the public portion of the meeting, the Molly Bannister Drive extension will once again come before Council. Melcor has submitted a third application to remove the road extension from City plans. A nine-hour public consultation back in 2020 resulted in Council voting to keep the extension in the plans, but the new Council may have a different view. If Council gives first reading to the bylaw removing the road, a Public Hearing will be held on January 16th, 2023.
  
  
• A meeting of the Housing and Homelessness Integration Committee will be held on Tuesday. No time or agenda is available yet.
  
  
• Budget deliberations will take place from November 28th - 30th, and like all Council meetings, the public can attend in person or watch online. While the opportunity to provide feedback online has ended, residents can still contact their Councillors to make their opinions known.

Last Week In Red Deer:

• There were no ICU beds available at the Red Deer General Hospital and patients were diverted to Edmonton or Calgary. Alberta Health Services said that, provincially, ICUs were at 86% occupancy. Due to wait times and capacity issues, a patient with a broken ankle waited 24 hours at the ER while being tended to by EMS staff, rather than doctors. Wait times were reported to be 17 hours and the state of the ER “absolute chaos.”
  
  
• The Red Deer and District Museum Society celebrated its 50-year anniversary. For the next year, the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery (MAG) will be giving out free one-year memberships as a thank you gift to the community. Red Deerians looking to claim the membership can do so at the front desk or online. To celebrate the half-century milestone, there will be special events held over the next year at the MAG, including a 1970s-themed birthday party, displays of special artifacts from the vaults, and, as a fun nod to the time the institution “won” an international award for World’s Most Boring Postcard, replicas of the postcards will be sold online and the image put on sweatshirts and t-shirts.
  
  
• Red Deer Polytechnic celebrated Métis Week, the week surrounding Louis Riel Day on November 16th. Students learned about Indigenous war veterans, residential schools, and local Métis history and culture, and took part in a bannock lunch. A collaboration between the school and the Red Deer Native Friendship Society provided an opportunity for people to watch or take part in Indigenous games.

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