Episode 210 of Speaking Municipally goes deep into city council's decision to reopen a downtown stretch of 102 Avenue to vehicle traffic despite asking administration eight months ago for a bylaw to close it to cars.
As disappointed as co-hosts Troy Pavlek and Mack Male were about the decision, they were even more concerned about what this suggests about council's decision-making process.
"There's no coherence in the sort of things that come forward and the way that they discuss them a few months later," Male said. "It really makes me concerned about some of the other upcoming important decisions that we know are going to be in front of us in the next few months."
Though veteran councillors Sarah Hamilton and Tim Cartmell have expressed concerns in other contexts about re-litigation, Pavlek noted that neither seemed concerned about overturning an earlier decision to run a pilot project closing the avenue from 99 Street to 103 Street.
"This was the very definition of reopening past business," he said.
Council went on to ask for a report detailing uses and interactions on 102 Avenue in the six months after the LRT starts running. This did not fill our city hall watchers with confidence either.
"I think the ambition of this request is much higher than what we're going to see from it," Pavlek said.
Hear more thoughts on the 102 Avenue decision and the extra money approved for the 103A Avenue Pedway on the Feb. 24 episode of Taproot's civic affairs podcast.
Photo: Councillors Andrew Knack and Jo-Anne Wright, seen here in October 2021, were on opposite sides of the vote on keeping 102 Avenue closed to cars. (Mack Male/Flickr)