Calgary Minute: Golden Handshakes, LRT Delays, and Ward Gerrymandering

Calgary Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Calgary politics

This Week In Calgary:

• There are, of course, no Council meeting or committee meetings this week due to the Christmas break.
  
  
• Over the holiday, there are a large number of Christmas and winter events happening around the City. Here are just a few of them.
  
  
• The 2020 Council Calendar is also now available. Committee meetings resume on January 7th and the next council meeting is scheduled for January 13th.

Last Week In Calgary:

• Council voted to end the practice of offering Golden Handshake retirement bonuses to City Staff, but the change won't actually happen until at least 2022. Councillor Farkas put forward a motion to end the payments in January 2020 instead, but this was voted down 9-4 when City lawyers warned that City Staff might sue the City for removing this benefit.
  
  
• For months we've been saying that the Green Line is already behind schedule, and for months the City has denied it. Turns out we were right, as the City finally admitted at Council that they are not on track for the planned construction start and opening dates. 
  
  
• Council voted to continue with their plan to only conduct an internal review of their own Ward Boundaries for the 2021 election. For the last election, this was done by an independent committee but Council didn't like the results, so they abolished the committee, threw out their proposal, and did the boundaries themselves. This time, they won't even bother with a committee. Councillor Farkas successfully amended this year's plan to avoid potential bias by not counting sitting councillors as stakeholders in this process, but Farkas was the only councillor to vote against the plan overall.

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