City Notebook: How best to flush?

By COLLIN GALLANT on May 11, 2019.

They say municipal governments, that is to say local City Halls, deal with matters that are most immediate to residents.

Of percolating concern this spring is the issue of how to best hook up toilets in the south end of town.

A matter before the planning commission this week asked that an acreage-style property be built on a small parcel of land north of S. Boundary Road.

The interesting issue though, is a recommendation to allow a septic tank and cistern as the best way to avoid building an entire sewer and water system to a single property.

That’s a single connection, mind you.

The looming issue is the nearby Coulee Ridge development falls into somewhat the same category. That proposal was given the red-carpet treatment when the high-end lake community plan was proposed this winter. That locales comprising 200-lots in an initial plan, is also a good distance from existing sewer, water and road infrastructure, and this column expects some manner of fancy footwork to hook it up.

Whole communities take years to build and the developer tells the News there’s a business case for the construction this spring, and likely an appetite for more in the general area.

Building in non-contiguous areas is typically called leap-frog development, and planners and financial officials despise it because, since utility lines also get paid off over the same time, via a fee on developers, the longer they go underused, the higher the end cost becomes.

City Hall subsidizes those fees at a 40 per cent rate, remember.

On a somewhat related front, administrators have also made a priority out of updating it’s development standards manual.

That could include being updated with allowances for less sidewalk, for example, in some areas to lower costs, both initially on the developer and eventually on city maintenance.

Green

We haven’t heard much about the Alberta Emerald Awards since the local effort to sweep noxious weed baby’s breath off grasslands in the city’s north end was a nominee for the environmental award several years ago.

The 2019 awards list of nominees, out now, includes a nod to Southland Transportation, which operates the largest fleet of propane-fuelled vehicles in the province (the province-wide company operates local school buses, as well as the new Highway 3 “Connector” regional bus route).

The City of Edmonton gets three nods this year, including one for its home energy inspection program.

Medicine Hat’s Hat Smart, which does much the same and has a more extensive rebate program, won the 2010 award for governments.

A notable sidebar to all this is that federal energy efficiency crews were in town this week to honour a local contractor. Energy Plus Insulation will be featured in a video the agency is producing, and that should include a nod to the city’s programming.

A look ahead

The Medicine Hat public library’s annual report is due out Monday. Opposition MLAs will be sworn in Monday, followed by government MLAs after the long weekend when the legislature resumes sitting on May 21.

100 years ago

The text of the Treaty of Versailles was first presented to the Germans on may 7, 1919, the News of the day reported, following four months of meetings between 27 allied nations and dominions at the Paris Peace Conference.

Also in Europe, the War Cabinet in London recommended equal pay for equal work in regards to male and female employees, though “when it is contended that women employees produce less than a man for he same work, the onus of proof should lie on the employer.”

Alberta Conservative party leader George Hoadley told an audience in Ottawa that the horse breeding sector in the province was is such dire oversupply that a program of slaughter and food export should be devised.

U.S. industrial officials proposed combining hundreds of privately owned rail lines in to 20 major privately held, but government-regulated lines was the only answer to stabilizing the sector.

Members of the newly formed Redcliff Agricultural Society promised a fair to be held in the town in the summer.

Scuttlebutt on the sporting page noted that lawn bowlers in the city were seriously considering organizing a club.