Medicine Hat Minute: Utility Payments, Municipal Candidates, and an Invest Medicine Hat Scandal

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

This Week In Medicine Hat:

• City Hall's fairly light schedule starts today with a Public Services Committee Meeting at 12:15 pm where they will discuss a bid to host the 2026 Special Olympics Canada Summer Games. Medicine Hat was selected to host the 2022 Games, but they were cancelled due to COVID.
  
  
• Tuesday's Corporate Services Committee Meeting will start at 12:00 pm and will mostly be closed to the public to hear "advice from officials". Their only other business is to authorize some signatories as part of the City’s corporate restructuring.
  
  
• The race for Mayor and Council continues to heat up. There are now three candidates for Mayor and seventeen candidates for Council listed on the City's website.

Last Week In Medicine Hat:

• What were they even thinking? That's the question Hatters are asking after a private company was formed by three city staffers and just-so-happened to be the only bidders for one Invest Medicine Hat contract. The optics aren’t good and have many residents and stakeholders expressing concerns over the shady deal.
  
  
• Real estate brokers representing six firms in the city are now urging a full stop to any contracting out of Invest Medicine Hat, while the City seeks other interested parties with a more reasonable time-frame for participation. We will update you as this story continues to unfold.
  
  
• One tidbit of good news from last week is that, although Hatters owe $1.5 million on their municipal utility bills after a pandemic program to defer payments ended, that money won't be recovered through a utility rider. ​​The City's Manager of Customer Accounts and Billing credits the Utility's success to choosing to administer their own fund to pay for deferred bill payments, instead of opting into the provincial plan.

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