The current city council could care less what the citizens have to say regardless what the subject matter is; they appear to be working off the past city council’s mayoral playbook.
I have written to all council members a couple times with an array of subject matters and to date, not one has seen fit to weigh in on my correspondence. Granted my correspondence with them was not flowery or complimentary any manner, but if they cannot stomach criticism, maybe political life is not something they should be in.
I mention what I see are issues with the new blue bag recycle plan being forced forward by the mayor and council. The mere fact of going backwards with recycling and directing more waste to the landfill, and increasing the cost of curbside recycling in conjunction with this new approach is questionable.
I mentioned the fact why do we have blue bag every week and why our brown container is not in line with the green container. The brown container, which only has every two weeks’ pickup, is ridiculous. This container starts to stink pretty bad especially if you have babies or grandchildren with all those diapers. This brown container should be like the green container – during the warmer season picked up every week.
Then I weighed in on the absolute ridiculous decision taken by council to not allow the school buses to continue to be exempt from any changes to the idling bylaw. Absolute narrow-minded vision being forced into play by the city, much like the helmet law for cyclists.
Most school buses are diesel motor operated and when it gets cold, those tins cans are cold. It is inconceivable that adults would openly subject those young children to this hardship. If council figures it not a hardship, then shut those city buses off when they are not moving. Watch for the results. Oh ya, they already know the results!
I recently reached out to our city public works department to address what I considered to be a traffic safety issue – the line of sight looking up the street before turning onto it was being impaired by tree ground level sprout growth, three- to four-feet tall and wide. It has been two weeks and nothing has been rectified. The leaves have now fallen off the undergrowth. Still not resolved. I suspect my concern was not resolved as the request did not come from city hall.
The laughable thing was the city came the day after I originally requested the tree sprout to be cut, amazingly they drove by the trees where the issue was and trimmed the 12” sprout growth on the tree in front of my neighbour’s home!! Additional contact was made to try to rectify.
Gordon Cochrane, St. Albert
