Calgary Minute: Guidebook Delayed, COVID Rules, and Four Types Of Pay Hikes At City Hall

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

This Week In Calgary:

• City Hall will be quiet this week, with Council set to take a break until April 6th for the Easter holidays.
  
  
• The only exception will be a meeting of the Green Line Committee at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, where the only agenda item is a verbal update on the Green Line.
  
  
• The rumours are true, and we're happy to be able to confirm that we have teamed up with Danielle Smith for a series of video interviews with candidates for all fourteen wards across the City in the upcoming 2021 Calgary election! We'll have more news on this for you later this week, but for now, you can check out the current list of registered candidates for the election on the City's website.

Last Week In Calgary:

• The big story all week at City Hall was the three-day-long Public Hearing on the "Guidebook for Great Communities". Council started the week off by voting 3-11 against a motion by Councillor Chu to delay the Guidebook until after the election. With the delay rejected, Council then moved on to debate the guidebook itself and we live-tweeted the entire Guidebook three-day meeting which included nearly 18 hours of submissions from the public, plus presentations from the City and debate by Councillors. After hearing feedback from many frustrated Calgarians, Council decided to delay their final decision on the Guidebook until May, so we'll likely see you again for a repeat then!
  
  
• Also on Monday, the Province announced Alberta would not be moving to Step 3 of the government's reopening plan, despite the Province being below the 300 hospitalizations threshold required for Step 3 for quite some time. The Province cited the spread of variants as their justification, and have since suggested that restrictions may even have to be increased again. It's true that since the announcement cases have risen slightly, but hospitalization numbers have actually dropped. When are we going to start following the actual data, rather than models and predictions? If you haven't signed our petition to Reopen Calgary yet, you can do so here.
  
  
• Finally, we found out that while Calgarians suffer amidst the COVID pandemic, Council handed out pay hikes to tens of thousands of City staff. Some staff could actually have received three or four different types of pay hikes in the same year. The City report refers to regular pay hikes, step progressions, promotional reclassifications, and internal transfers. One thing we do know now - if anyone out there still believes there has been any kind of spending restraint at City Hall in recent years, they mustn't have been paying any attention.

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