City Notebook: Have you seen the price of two-by-fours lately?

By COLLIN GALLANT on December 17, 2022.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

A delicate but growing conversation in the budget debate is the city’s hope to spend $540,000 next year to build a public washroom at Towne Square.

That was the also focus of so much rhetoric in the last budget update one year ago.

It has provoked chuckles, head shakes and smirks during city council’s prolonged budget process this year.

Downtown business owners want public facilities to prevent a parade of those hanging around downtown coming through their doors, not to mention keep alleys and even front steps clean.

The half-million dollar budget is the big eyebrow raiser, though, because at first glance you can buy a toilet for a couple hundred bucks.

On further reflection, the city will need to pour a foundation, erect a building, install winterized men’s and women’s faculties, include some level of mischief-proofing, not to mention run sewer and water lines in the middle of a downtown block.

A half million? Have you seen the price of two-by-fours lately?

Of course, it’s also linked to the Towne Square debate that saw hand grenades tossed in last year’s budget battle between a largely new council and administration.

Was the washroom in or out of the original plan? Why and why not? Who approved it anyway? Well-chewed gristle in late 2021.

That has made it “just another boondoggle” in some quarters of community opinion, even though the site itself has been quite well-received.

Will it graduate to “White Elephant” status? That evergreen metaphor for government mismanagement that gets hanged on most civic projects these days.

And first impressions tend to be lasting ones.

For example, its been 30 years since the Trans-Canada was twinned and a rest stop added near Brooks, but locals still call it the “million-dollar outhouse.”

And “outhouse” is the polite version.

Quick ones

– After two strange Christmases it’s heartening but also disappointing to see people playing bumper cars in parking lots again. And, whatever happened to carolling?

– Controversy in Saskatchewan this week as new branded provincial park merchandise was unveiled. The rub is that the province’s website uses the term “Hooded Sweatshirt” instead of the more localized “Bunny Hug.” Says a top-notch Regina Leader-Post columnist on the subject: “Let’s accept who we are.”

It’s been a wild year in provincial politics. Is there more in store for Hatters before the clock strikes 12?

Full circle?

A proposed affordable housing development on Kipling Street comes, as several readers remind, after decades of city hall policy to discourage residential development on Kipling Street (one of the city’s first light industrial zones).

It’s mostly municipal land now, with work yards, the city’s garage, and other government uses after a 1983 plan by city hall aimed to end the hodge-podge of older houses and private businesses and workshops down there.

You may recall the Canada Post warehouse was moved there via a 2002 landswap with city hall to acquire the old downtown post-office for Esplanade construction.

The city’s general goal these days is to spur higher density, higher value development in mature neighbourhoods. But these days, open and available land in central Medicine Hat, it’s hard to make an omelette without cracking an egg.

It’s harder still to unscramble them.

City hall is painted the bad guy when it starts acquiring land or homes for whatever purpose (the Esplanade deal is maybe the last actual example), and the marching order for several years has been sell excess land in the city portfolio.

Elected officials have also been generally unwilling to say no to existing homeowners or developers when their plans don’t jive with zoning regulations.

The idea for Kipling Street – for Medicine Hat Community Housing Society to build 40 townhomes initially, goes before council on Monday.

A look ahead

The final city council meeting of 2022 is set for Monday with final deliberations on the agenda. The longest night of the year is Wednesday with the winter solstice and the official start of the winter season. But on the upside, days also start getting longer.

100 years ago

W.A. Moore was presented the News Cup for producing the best locally bred cockerel at the annual poultry show held at the Third Street Firehall, the News reported in mid-December 1922.

A mailbag tossed ashore at Newfoundland contained the “missing link” of evidence to solve a mysterious ocean mail theft years earlier. The finder, a 10-year-old girl, was wired a $100 reward in time for Christmas.

A year-end editorial noted on depressed economic conditions and that, strangely, the war which reduced labour force led to employment afterwards. The waste laid to Europe did not result in demand or economic boom in its reconstruction.

“War produces high wages and prices and other apparent indications of good times while it lasts,” it concluded. “But when it ends, it becomes evident that destruction cannot be the basis of prosperity.”

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.