Calgary Minute: Modular Classrooms, Memorial Drive, and Smith Supports Arena

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

This Week In Calgary:

• There will be a Combined Meeting of Council on Tuesday at 9:30 am. There is plenty of business to cover and the meeting begins with more than a dozen items on the consent agenda (the stuff they don’t debate.) There are also more than a dozen land use amendments scheduled for public hearing. The distribution of “graphic images” will also be discussed, with a Notice of Motion being proposed that would require flyers containing images showing a fetus to conceal these images from view through adhesives or envelopes and include a viewer discretion warning. Another Notice of Motion is on the table that aims to address noisy vehicles.
  
  
• The Calgary Planning Commission will meet on Thursday at 1:00 pm. Several land use amendments are on the agenda, as well as proposed secondary names for 17 streets in Bowness. The Bowness Historical Society applied for the secondary names, proposing historic street names from the town of Bowness prior to when it was annexed by the City of Calgary.
  
  
• On Friday, at 9:00 am, there will be a meeting of the Event Centre Committee. No agenda is available for this meeting yet, but with Premier Danielle Smith throwing her support behind the arena deal, there’s likely to be plenty of discussion. (More on that below.)

Last Week In Calgary:

• Premier Danielle Smith weighed in on the Calgary arena deal saying that the city needs a "world class event centre arena" and the time to get the project moving is "now.” In a letter addressed to Mayor Jyoti Gondek, among others, Smith said she wanted to explore ways that the Province could assist in getting a deal done, though she did not explicitly make any funding commitments.
  
  
• The second phase of the Memorial Drive East Functional Planning Study has been delayed. The project was intended to extend Memorial Drive to the east city limits at 116 Street East to accommodate new communities. A new crossing of the CN Rail line and an east-west overpass across Stoney Trail were part of the proposal. The first round of public engagement, conducted this summer, resulted in new ideas, new design features, and some concerns that the City plans to evaluate further.
  
  
• The Calgary Board of Education proposed the demolition of 15 modular classrooms. Despite adding nearly 6,000 students this year, the recommended utilization rate for schools sits at 85% capacity - a target that must be hit in order to receive operations and maintenance funding. The CBE aims to ensure schools are close to, or well above, that utilization rate. School trustees questioned demolishing the modular classrooms, wondering why class sizes should be bigger in order to qualify for funding.

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