Medicine Hat Minute: Gas Profits, Crime Down, and Extremely Cold Weather

Medicine Hat Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Medicine Hat politics

This Week In Medicine Hat:

• Welcome to the first edition of Medicine Hat Minute for 2022! Council is set to return from holiday, with two meetings scheduled for this week.
  
  
• Today, there will be a Regular Medicine Hat City Council meeting at 4:00 pm. At this meeting, Council will begin with a motion to close the meeting to the public, leaving us, unfortunately, little to report. Council will eventually revert to an open meeting where they will receive a couple of presentations from the Executive Director of the Medicine Hat Destination Marketing Organization Society, and a presentation from the Superintendent of Implementation on a direct control development permit. Council will also declare August 1, 2022, a civic holiday before adjourning.
  
  
• On Wednesday, there will be an Energy and Infrastructure Committee meeting at 3:30 pm. It's unclear what's scheduled for this meeting other than approving funding for two pieces of heavy equipment for the airport, as Council has decided to conduct the remainder of this meeting in-camera (in secret). Is it just us, or does this Council like to pose for the in-camera? For a Mayor who campaigned and won on the issues of transparency and accountability, she sure is making it awfully tough to find out what's going on at City Hall. Hopefully, transparency and accountability are on Council's resolution list for this year.

Last Week In Medicine Hat:

• An extremely cold blast of arctic air descended upon Southern Alberta and the rest of Western Canada last week. Although no records were broken in the South, that wasn’t the case in Central and Northern Alberta, which saw seven daily minimum temperature records broken on December 28th. Vegreville’s -44.6 C low broke the town’s record, for instance, set back in 1968.
  
  
• Medicine Hat again fell below the provincial average for "severe crimes" on Alberta’s Crime Severity Index. Medicine Hat received a score of 78.78 in the 2020 fiscal year, compared to Alberta’s average of 107.36.
  
  
• What remains of Medicine Hat's once-sprawling City-owned shallow gas holdings are expected to be profitable again in the mid-term. This rosy outlook comes in the wake of stronger prices and current supply concerns. The City should perhaps consider selling some of these assets while they are profitable, instead of risking them becoming taxpayer-funded liabilities in the future.

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