Medicine Hat Minute: Issue 270

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

📅 This Week In Medicine Hat: 📅

• There will be a City Council meeting this evening at 6:30 pm. Council votes tonight on a recommendation to leave business licence fees unchanged for the rest of 2026 and then cut them from January 1st, 2027. Administration is asking Council to eliminate the fourth fee tier and move those businesses into the third, with second-tier fees tentatively set between $190 and $225 and third-tier fees between $390 and $450. The tiered structure Council adopted for 2025 lifted the base business fee from $117 in 2024 to $200 in 2025 and $225 in 2026, and licensing revenue on roughly 3,500 active licences rose from $666,597 in 2024 to $1,005,047 in 2025. Planning and Development Services reports numerous complaints from businesses since the new schedule took effect. The report puts seven options in front of Council, including a single flat fee of $100, which Administration estimates would cost about $632,000 and is equivalent to a 0.6% municipal tax increase, dropping the fee to $0 at a cost of about $1 million, or repealing the licensing bylaw and getting out of business licensing altogether. Administration recommends the smaller 2027 adjustment, which it calculates would give up roughly $150,000 in revenue collected above budget while staying within budgeted amounts.
  
  
• Council will also be asked tonight to approve a reallocation inside the City's $4,005,000 electric generation capital budget, moving $2,240,000 between power plant projects. The money comes out of six projects that finished under budget or are no longer needed, including a cancelled $575,000 storage tank optimization and two gas chromatograph upgrades worth $150,000 each. The largest new allocation is $1,200,000 to replace and overhaul a cracked combustor on Unit 11, work that Administration says was already authorized under the City's emergency approval provision and is now underway. Another $900,000 would go to Pumphouse 7, where some equipment is more than 50 years old and where a failure would cut off the cooling water supply to the 3R steam turbine and force a 35-megawatt reduction in plant output. Administration says no new money is required and the total budget stays at $4,005,000.
  
  
• Councillor Chris Hellman has filed a notice of motion on the protection of Medicine Hat's watershed, source water and water quality, to be introduced at tonight's Council meeting. The motion would have Council reaffirm its support for protecting the South Saskatchewan River watershed, which is the source of the city's drinking water, and direct Administration to identify future actions on source water protection, groundwater, stormwater quality, drought and flood resilience and irrigation reliability. It would also have Mayor Linnsie Clark write to Premier Danielle Smith and four provincial ministers asking that decisions on upstream activities affecting the watershed be made through transparent, evidence-based assessment, meaningful consultation with downstream municipalities and enforceable protections. Hellman's motion, seconded by Councillor Stuart Young, follows Councillor Bill Cocks' "Water Not Coal" motion, which died at the July 6th meeting when no Councillor would second it. The new motion states that the earlier failure was a procedural matter rather than opposition to watershed protection, and grounds its case in the City's own environmental framework and the $245,000 budget amendment Council approved on June 15th for the Water Management and Adaptation Strategy. 
  
  
• Also on tonight's agenda, Council will consider first reading of a new bylaw governing the Subdivision and Development Appeal Board, the body that hears appeals of subdivision and development permit decisions. The existing bylaw dates from 1994, and rather than amend it the City Clerk's office is proposing to repeal and replace it outright. The new bylaw would increase the number of Board members to improve availability and hearing scheduling, modernize hearing procedures, clarify the Chair's duties, and authorize the recording and publication of Board hearings on the City's YouTube channel. Administration says there are no financial implications and did not undertake any external engagement, describing the changes as primarily administrative and procedural. If Council gives first reading tonight, second and third readings would come back on September 8th. 
  
  
• The City has released the results of its second round of public consultation on the Riverside Corridor Enhancement Project, a planned rebuild of roughly two kilometers of Third Street North through the historic Riverside neighbourhood. The What We Heard Report runs about 400 pages, including some 330 pages of resident comments, and follows door-to-door visits with more than 220 households along the corridor, four open houses and a survey that drew 696 responses. Almost 50% of survey respondents disagreed that the proposed investment was good value. The City has committed $7.45 million in capital spending for the surface work, about 98% of which comes from federal and provincial grant programs, and Environmental Utilities has separately asked Council to consider $10.32 million for deep utility upgrades in the 2027-28 business planning process. The feedback has already changed the design, removing a roundabout and eliminating 57 of the 64 proposed curb bulb-outs, and every deep utility along the route would now be replaced at the same time. Managing Director of Development and Infrastructure Pat Bohan says no decisions have been made on the design, and that the report goes to an open committee before reaching Council on September 8th. 

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