City Notebook: Private this and public that

By COLLIN GALLANT on September 28, 2019.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

The city will examine senior service programming this fall, first studying what’s provided and what’s expected, then potentially contracting out the service or getting a non-profit to take over operations at the Veiner and Strathcona centres.

If you’re keeping score at home, Medicine Hat has contracted out operations at the Canalta Centre, the pickup of curbside recycling, and until recently, economic development, over the past four years.

And it’s all happened in Medicine Hat, a city where supposedly the bureaucracy only gets bigger.

That track record doesn’t include the potential of a new private sector multi-plex arena. It was vaguely discussed in 2012, but is again cropping up in conversations around town when one least expects.

One substantial item may have been taken off the city’s to-do list, however.

Telus said this week it will follow through on a major infrastructure program announced last February by expanding its fibre-optic cable network across Alberta.

Anyone with half an ear will note that 5G is all the buzz. It allows users to download a full-length movie in a matter of seconds. It also expands capabilities of businesses, making it a key ingredient in economic development models to better connect rural and mid-sized cities. “Conductivity” allows access to the “economy of tomorrow,” don’t you know?

Olds was a municipality that went it alone with a public utility geared toward cable, and the Siksika reserve has one as well.

More recently rural power provider, Equs, has made overtures that it might insert itself into the discussion. The Eastern Irrigation District somewhat does this already.

Several aldermen wondered in the early 2000s: Medicine Hat owns two energy distribution companies and has history of public enterprises, so why not a city fibre-optic company?

Needless to say, the ball didn’t get rolling. Nor did Norm Boucher’s spitballing about a city-owned airline.

As it is, Hatters will have to wait several months to find out Telus’s rollout schedule according to the company that is already operating the platform in Taber.

Hot gossip

What you’re reading was calls for a “gossip column” by a sometime reader several weeks ago – eliciting an eye-roll from your author.

But, still, here’s a hot one: a number of commercial realtors I’ve been talking to say a lot of activity is bubbling under the surface of the Medicine Hat market. That could come to the surface soon, and would be on top of gain in new floorspace and recent renovations. It comes after vaping and cannabis retailers flooded into the market since 2018.

A look ahead

A meeting of the public service committee of the city will discuss potential changes to senior services on Tuesday.

That night, the provincial opposition NDP hold a budget town hall event at the Esplanade. A rural crime meeting by Alberta’s justice minister is set for Monday at the Medicine Hat Feed Company. Wednesday features a forum of federal election candidates at Medicine Hat College Theatre presented by the local Chamber of Commerce. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

100 years ago

A crowd of 3,000 Hatters watched the hometown Monarchs sweep a doubleheader from the Calgary Hustlers to win the Alberta amateur men’s baseball championship of 1919, a banner front-page story in the News informed on Oct. 2, 1919.

The crowd, bolstered by the declaration of a civic holiday by Mayor Brown, watched the local ball artists defeat the visitors 4-3 and 9-8 at the athletic grounds in Riverside.

“If noise decided baseball games, the Monarchs would have no trouble copping,” the correspondent noted.

In the major leagues, the seemingly unbeatable Chicago White Sox were poised to open the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

Locally the attendance at St. Theresa’s Academy topped 100 pupils in its sixth year of operation.

William Lyon MacKenzie King would seek a commons seat in Summerside, P.E.I. The new Liberal Party leader (the first since the party split during the Union Government’s formation) was a former labour minister who had had worked for U.S. Industrialist J.D. Rockefeller since 1915.

Ald. Jimmy Hole was elected president of the Medicine Hat branch of the Dominion Labour party.

U.S. federal troops entered Omaha, Neb. after a black man was lynched, the town’s mayor was marched to a trolley pole threatened with the same and a courthouse was burned down by an angry mob.

The Ingersoll and Bros. watch company advertised that new pocket models would feature hands and numerals coated with “real radium.”

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

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