End of summer intrigue at city hall

By COLLIN GALLANT on September 12, 2020.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

Some time ago the City on Medicine Hat met a new requirement to start publishing the minutes of closed-door meetings that council members hold.

Make no mistake, there’s not a lot of meat on those bones, as they only denote a meeting took place, who was present and how long it took.

Still, it provides a tantalizing glimpse of what’s cooking.

On Aug. 31, for example, eight of nine current council members attended an energy and utility committee meeting (typically held with three councillors every second Thursday).

A week later, the division posted an open bidding process for its main oilfield, the Glauc C, north of town – in what administrators described to the News as an exercise in good practice of valuating assets.

Essentially, seeing what interest is out there.

That could be what was discussed on Aug. 31; no one’s allowed to say, due to privacy rules that the city invokes to protect its sensitive business dealings.

But there’s lots of other topics, like the well abandonment program that’s well underway, or how best to put to rest the legal wrangling over a condo lift station that wound up at the Supreme Court (sewage is a utility) that could have been floated.

Still, it seems likely a bigger fish began frying if it required attendance from council members. (Coun. Robert Dumanowski, a principal in private life, had a conflict owing to that day’s return of classes amid a pandemic).

But we’re in an era of big topics for the city and elsewhere.

Related to energy and utilities, which are Medicine Hat’s basic DNA, there’s the future of electricity production to figure out how to provide the softest landing possible from exiting the gas sector, or perhaps even a wildcard. The year 2020 has dealt out plenty of those.

Sask-Alta

It’s soon to be a provincial election in Saskatchewan. Exhibit A is that Premier Scott Moe was scheduled to be in Maple Creek on Thursday to view firehall construction that benefits from a municipal stimulus grant.

Nomination day in some rural communities in that province is one week away.

By the way… Maple Creek is also in the middle of two town-wide fundraising campaigns to build a new swimming pool as well as the firehall. Fox Valley’s pushing to build a new town hall with cash jingled up from around the town.

On this side of the boundary, an effort to keep HALO flying is going great (see coverage elsewhere in this edition), but smalltown Saskatchewan is really showing up Alberta’s mid-sized municipalities in terms of civic pride and getting the community behind local improvements.

A look ahead

There are no public city committee meetings this week, but rest up, because parliament is back in session Sept. 23 (a week from Wednesday).

100 years ago

Reformer Nellie McClung spoke at the Empress Theatre declaring that with suffrage well-advanced, other matters to better the place of women in society must see action, the News reported in early September 1920.

That included financial matters such as insurance, mortgage and estate laws that disadvantaged women.

“Autocracy is going,” she declared. “And we are advancing the rule of people. But we need people who are educated, law-abiding and sober,” she said.

In other local news, officials with the Exeter Canning Co. expressed their confidence that a plant in Medicine Hat could be successful considering the length of the growing season and suitability of land for the Ontario firms’ chief crops of corn, beans and peas.

Nearly 20 had died and 200 were injured as rioting in Belfast continued for a second week.

Canada had virtually no trade deficit, Ottawa announced, stating exports totalled $1.25 billion for the year and the difference to imports was less than $10 million.

Collin Gallant covers city politics and a variety of topics for the News. Reach him at 403-528-5664 or via email at cgallant@medicinehatnews.com.