Calgary Minute: Long Weekend, WinSport Funding, and Bike Lane Confusion

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

This Week In Calgary:

• Today is a holiday and we hope you enjoy the long weekend! While Council’s month-long recess is technically over, there are no meetings of City Council until next week, though there are some Committee meetings.
  
  
• The Intergovernmental Affairs Committee will meet on Wednesday at 9:30 am to hear briefings from recent meetings of Calgary Metropolitan Region Board committees. Two confidential items are on the agenda as well, a provincial update and information regarding land annexation in Rocky View County.
  
  
• The Infrastructure and Planning Committee will meet on Friday at 9:30 am. No agenda is available for this meeting yet.

Last Week In Calgary:

• The Province announced that plans for a safe consumption site at the Calgary Drop-In Centre will not proceed. Instead, the government will continue to work toward “a more suitable overdose prevention model within Calgary than what currently exists.” Residents of East Village had expressed concern about the lack of consultation as well as safety issues around locating the site in their neighbourhood.
  
  
• Councillor Kourtney Penner expressed her confusion at a petition circulated by residents who oppose the Riverbend bike lane pilot. The three-week pilot project was an attempt at traffic calming, reducing 18 Street S.E. between Quarry Park Blvd and Rivervalley Drive S.E. to single-lane traffic. Penner said that the project was never intended to be permanent. Sorry, what? If there were no plans to ever make the bike path permanent, why exactly did Council spend thousands of dollars on the pilot in the first place?
  
  
• The federal government announced $17.4 million in funding to help renovate the WinSport day lodge at Canada Olympic Park. Built for the 1988 Olympics, the day lodge has never undergone a major renovation. The goal is to make the lodge more accessible and inclusive and built to a net-zero standard. The final project is estimated to cost between $39 and $43 million depending on the design chosen, meaning more funding will be needed.

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