Medicine Hat Minute: Independent Audits, Secret Meetings, and a Power Price Spike

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

This Week In Medicine Hat:

• It appears that it's back to work for City Council with three committee meetings scheduled for this week. We say it "appears so" because virtually no element of these meetings will be held in public.
  
  
• First on the schedule is a Public Services Committee Meeting today at 12:15 pm. Although we'd love to report what went on in this meeting, City Council opted to conduct this meeting almost entirely in secret. It's followed at 4:00 pm by a meeting of the ironically-named Open Administrative and Legislative Review Committee with one public agenda item - a motion to close the meeting to the public.
  
  
• On Tuesday there will be a Corporate Services Committee Meeting at 12:00 pm. As this meeting is also closed to the public, unfortunately, there will likely be nothing to report back to you.

Last Week In Medicine Hat:

• Council has found themselves in hot water in recent weeks and reacted by approving a motion to conduct a third-party audit of how the outsourcing of Invest Medicine Hat was handled. Recall that the "outsourcing" consisted of three City employees forming a company in February which happened to be the only bidder on the contract. We will keep you updated as this story develops.
  
  
• Some utility customers are not going to be happy when they get their power bills in the mail next month. Although the City offers a set rate for power, it warned customers that are on a floating commodity rate to expect their power bills to increase by up to 20% in August. Yikes!
  
  
• Amid controversy over rural bed closures this summer, a recently launched AHS website shows no disruptions in the South Zone, including in Medicine Hat.

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