Calgary City Council gets back to work at its first meeting of 2025 on Tuesday, after what can best be described as an acrimonious and tumultuous 2024.
The year saw council approve, then repeal a single-use bag bylaw that defied commonsense in the first place; approve a motion to eliminate areas of the city zoned only for single-family homes despite the wishes of Calgarians to not approve it; put the entire city on water rations after a massive water main break that many said could have been prevented with regular maintenance.
On the upside, council did vote down a huge multi-family, multi-tower development that would have turned the southwest intersection of 14 st. and 90 ave. into a parking lot.
The year ended with the Alberta Government putting forth its vision for the Green Line LRT route, a vastly different version than that favoured by Calgary council. At stake is money, lots of money, from the Alberta and federal governments.
The province has essentially said it will cut funding if its route isn’t adopted by the city, while the federal funds were due to dry up by the end of March. With the duties of Parliament being prorogued (suspended) by Prime Minister Trudeau, the availability of those funds has now become uncertain.
The Green Line issue will be the first piece of business for council this year and will no doubt be debated behind closed doors, with a small compromise to the province’s plan likely being the result before council accepts the plan. Whether the federal funds will flow this way is the big question.
However, we’re talking about a fractious council in terms of political philosophies and ideologies, so what we can expect is hardly clear, much as it has been the last four years.
What should Calgarians expect in 2025? This is an election year in Calgary, so one would think council members would be on their best behaviour and learn from last year. However, council members are very much divided between ideology and common sense, with the former hell bent on leaving a legacy by dictating and managing how Calgarians live, as per the newly released Calgary Plan.
The commonsense group approaches their duties from a business point of view.
The City of Calgary is the largest business in the city and should be run as a business. It has roughly 1.5 million clients (Calgarians) who require a number of services and expect those services, for which they pay continually increasing taxes, on demand when they need them.
Things such as clearing snow off the streets in a timely and efficient manner, and maybe leaving the bike lanes as the last to be cleared. At other times of the year, fix potholes and do other street maintenance as soon as its needed. Make sure there’s water in the faucets and electricity in the outlets.
I’m not saying it’s easy and it does require a large staff to get things done properly.
According to CBC, as of the end of September last year, the city employs 15,571 people, which seems like enough to take on all tasks, but holding things back is an administration so deeply mired in bureaucracy and DEI that too many things take too long to be approved, let alone get accomplished.
An acquaintance of mine in the land development industry has told me of times his company takes plans for a new community, only to have one administrative official say no to where a park or road is replaced, even though another official had already approved it.
As mentioned above, this is an election year for council and perhaps it was good that council spent so much time tripping over itself last year. It caught the attention of Calgarians, who are not known to be much involved in civic politics, but perhaps now will be motivated to actually get involved in the city’s business, because it's their business as well.
The election is October 20 and between now and then, expect some familiar faces to not seek office again, while others will.
Look for new faces in the races as well and something quite new: municipal political parties. More on those soon.