It’s a busy week at Calgary city hall meeting-wise, but the bulk of the content is in two main meetings: Executive Committee and Community Development.

There’s a nominations committee meeting Monday. There, they’ll discuss adding a new public member to the Licence and Community Standards Appeal Board.

On Wednesday, the Legacy Parks Program Committee will set a schedule and get an overview of the Legacy Parks Program.

Executive committee meeting

The city’s executive committee will look at a handful of items this week, including a bushel of notices of motion.

Still, the one thing that isn’t on the agenda that could be added and dominate the session would be the Beltline (and other) protests. It’s stirred up a fair bit of social media politics after this past Saturday’s melee in the Beltline.

Notices of motion

There are eight notices of motion on the agenda this week. It should be noted that this is a discussion on the technical merits of the NoMs. If they pass muster on technical merits, only then will they be forwarded to council for debate.

They include:

• Official city bird
• Parks programming for businesses (Coming soon)
• Noise barrier retrofit program
• Tax relief for properties annexed under municipal governmet board order
• Targeted relief for hotels and motels (Coming soon)
• Service plans / budgets for Calgary fire
• Time based restrictions for bikes on Calgary Transit
• Ramsay TOD direct land sale

As you can see above, we’ve covered a handful of these already and will add to this as more stories come in.

Accountability

Committee members will also review a report that shows, despite the pandemic, 86 per cent of the city’s strategies are progressing. Further, 60 per cent of the performance measures show the strategies are meeting or exceeding performance measures.

The city invested $1.2 billion in infrastructure, though lower than the $2.4 billion capital budget. Further investigation is required.

Community Development Committee

This week’s Community Development Committee meeting has a couple of interesting items, including one on encouraging street play.

Encouraging Street Play

According to city information, changes would need to be made to Alberta’s Traffic Safety Act for street play to be legal in Calgary.

That legislation doesn’t allow playing on roadways. The city said they can’t supersede provincial legislation. 

They point out they’re trying to promote more structured play.

Changes to the smoking bylaw

The city looked into changes potential changes to the city’s smoking and vaping bylaw around waterpipes and shisha lounges, smoking in hotels and motels and smoking in multi-unit public housing.

At this time no major changes are being suggested. The city is making a minor amendment to the bylaw to ensure the smoking bylaw doesn’t infringe on Indigenous or other cultural ceremonies.

Other items

The city will also discuss the establishment of a climate advisory committee and a special bylaw to support enhanced landscape maintenance.

There are two items coming with updates to terms of reference.