Still working through monster agenda for tomorrow! 2200+ pages! Lots of controversial but important decisions to be made.--
Naheed Nenshi (@nenshi)
Yeah, the agenda for this week's council meeting serves as a major stimulus for the lumber industry. It's easily the biggest one in years, and was going to be a massive agenda even before the flood wiped out several weeks worth of municipal business. It should easily stretch into Tuesday, and then could go into Friday (following other committees Wednesday and Thursday), ruining everybody's .
But those 2,200 pages are predominantly a glut of procedural stuff, rubber-stamp-ready reports and land-use hearings that aldermen will try to cull from the stack by deferring to the fall. And most of the rest won't get much press attention because they're relatively minor (and the bar for what makes news in my books has, honestly, risen after Calgary's major natural disaster).
But here's what I'll be watching for:
THE $52-MILLION QUESTION -- The most talked-about item on Monday's agenda isn't even on the agenda. Mayor Naheed Nenshi will have to bring up the question of how (or whether) to spend council $52-million tax hike -- or surplus, or windfall, or what you will -- through a urgent business item. He told CBC last Friday that "this little bit of money to aid in flood recovery and future mitigationat least for the next couple years." Ald. Gord Lowe, his sometimes nemesis, also wants the money to .
To get a majority among the Gang of 15, are there six more votes on council for that purpose, rather than transit, debt relief, or those other options touted what now seems like an generation ago? Consider this: six aldermen had flooding in their wards (Hodges, Pootmans, Farrell, Mar, Carra and Pincott), and I'd be surprised if up-the-hill Gael MacLeod or Jim Stevenson would block this path in favour of transit. The others want the tax relief option (Jones, Chabot, Keating, Colley-Urquhart, Demong) but they may face a tougher path than the flood-aid crew. And in this post-flood election year, who knows which choice proves more popular?
STADIUM SHOPPING CENTRE REDEVELOPMENT -- "Garrison Woods, yes. Mini downtown, no," the head of University Heights Community Association . Council got of community letters, much of it saying roughly the same thing. This new vision for the old strip mall and parking lot appears to land somewhere in between the high-end Garrison Woods development and downtown, more akin to the redevelopment of Brentwood plaza approved by the previous council. The includes up to 240 hotel rooms, 372 residential units, about double the retail/commercial space and a thwack of office space. Expect lengthy resident appeals about traffic impact, parking, community fabric and building height. If council does the usual thing they do in these cases -- hears the marathon of public presentations and then sends the plan back to planners for months of refinement -- they create an obvious election issue for Ward 1 candidates. (We don't know yet if Dale Hodges will be one yet.)
7TH AVENUE AUTOPARK -- It's an intriguing idea that's been : restore that dilapidated row of buildings on 7th Avenue by building a 14-storey automated parkade and tower above it, which in turn subsidizes those old heritage storefronts. But to do that, council would have to undo several decades of parking policy that discourages private standalone parkades. It would also create a big parkade with access from an alleyway in between two non-car avenues: 7th and 8th. "This would be a shift. It could be seen as a precedent," said planning general manager Rollin Stanley said . This one's a pickle for a council that likes heritage restoration but may not be sure of the tradeoff.
FLOOD UPDATES -- There will be some news coming out from the world of flood recovery, even if nothing is added to the agenda on this score. If all the aldermen and key city executives are in one spot, a few are bound to say some interesting things about the fallout and recovery of le deluge.
CRAMPED QUARTERS -- Flood-damaged City Hall and its chambers aren't open, so council's mult-day affair will occur in a hearing room at 1212 31 Avenue NE, in a much smaller room. With a zillion zoning items in various neighbourhoods touching numerous city planners and departments, the seats in the hearing room will be hotter commodities than Rogers Centre seats in a Blue Jays season where they live up to their potential (sigh). There will be overflow rooms. And who knows where the media will get to sit, crouch, squat, pace angrily.
I'LL BE FOLLOWING IT ALL ON THAT AND IN STORIES AT
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