Grande Prairie Minute: Issue 115

Grande Prairie Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Grande Prairie politics

📅 This Week In Grande Prairie: 📅

• A resident delegation from the O'Brien Lake Neighbourhood Association will appear before City Council today, at the evening session beginning at 6:00 pm, to press for completion of a boardwalk across O'Brien Lake. The group says it has been pursuing the crossing with Parks and Recreation and other City departments since before 2019, only to see it repeatedly deferred, most recently behind the twinning of Highway 40, while construction costs keep climbing. The Association argues the boardwalk is needed for safety and accessibility and to complete a walking path used by surrounding neighbourhoods, noting that students outside bus range have been told to use the route to walk to school. It wants the project included in next year's City budget, with Councillors and City Staff helping to secure grants or commercial donations. 
  
  
• Also today, Council will hold a public hearing on an application to rezone two lots on 108 Avenue in the VLA/Montrose neighbourhood and to add semi-detached dwellings as a permitted use in the Restricted Small Lot Residential district. Each lot currently holds a single detached home, and the applicant intends to redevelop both with semi-detached dwellings as a form of modest residential infill. Administration supports the change, noting the district and the area redevelopment plan have envisioned intensification on this block since 2009, but that the intended narrow-lot infill has not materialized over that period. The City says the block functions as a transition between lower-density housing to the north and medium-density housing to the south, and that the change applies only to this one block on the north side of 108 Avenue. 
  
  
• On Wednesday, at 1:30 pm, the Council Committee of the Whole will meet, with an update on the City's advocacy efforts among the items on the agenda. The report states that the Fair Electricity Distribution Alliance, which the City co-founded to address the higher distribution charges paid by residents in its service area, now has 35 members formally engaged. Alliance representatives met in May with the provincial Minister of Affordability and Utilities, who signalled plans to roll out initiatives this fall to help address the electricity distribution disparity. The update also notes the City has written to the Province in support of a Navigation and Support Centre in the northwest region to better coordinate services for people experiencing homelessness, securing a meeting and positive indications on that file. It further flags a provincial cabinet shuffle in late May that moved the affordability, social services, and finance portfolios.
  
  
• Also on Wednesday's agenda is a summary of recent grant activity. The largest award is $222,000 from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to procure and plant trees and help fund a water truck, alongside $35,000 from the federal Celebrate Canada program for National Indigenous Peoples Day and Canada Day events, $10,000 from the province for Seniors' Week programming, and $10,000 from the Municipal District of Greenview for museum programming. New applications include two requests to a provincial first-responder mental health program, $137,933 for the Public Safety Communications Centre and $117,933 for the Grande Prairie Police Service, plus a $10,000 request to host a free recreation facility access day on August 29th. Two applications were unsuccessful, a $417,600 federal Canada Summer Jobs request for summer positions across the city, and a $9,936 request to plant edible trees and shrubs in the Smith Community Orchard.
  
  
• The Canadian Forces Snowbirds will perform at the Grande Prairie Air Show on August 1st and 2nd, one of the team's last stops before its aircraft are grounded for several years. Defence Minister David McGuinty announced that the 60-year-old CT-114 Tutor jets, in service as a trainer since 1963 and flown by the Snowbirds since 1971, are being retired, with the federal government buying new CT-157 Siskin II aircraft to serve as both a trainer and a demonstration plane, based at 15 Wing Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The replacement jets are not expected until the early 2030s, so Ottawa says this will be the team's last flying season for a few years. Local residents will have the chance to see the Snowbirds before they are grounded.

🚨 This Week’s Action Item: 🚨