Speaking Municipally

Mack Male:
The itsy-bitsy surplus. This week, council got to ask questions about the proposed fall budget adjustment.

Stephanie Swensrude:
Plus, we learn more about how the city plans to enforce speed limits.

Mack:
Hi, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack:
Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, episode 334. Stephanie, in previous episodes, we were doing a countdown to election day.

Stephanie:
Oh, yes.

Mack:
In my house right now, the countdown is to Christmas.

Stephanie:
Yay!

Mack:
The kids figured out that it's less than a month to Christmas, and so the countdown has begun. Uh, and with that holiday season comes some colder weather. We're both enjoying some tea, I think.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
It looks like you've got some tea there.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
Uh, and you braved the cold to go to city hall this week, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah, I went to city hall 'cause I wanted to see, kind of get- get the vibe of the new council kind of making their biggest decision yet so far and watch the new councilors at- at work. And the vibe was not very spicy, you know. Uh, it's the last year before your budget cycle. There's not really a lot of huge changes, not a lot of huge surprises. One thing that I thought was interesting is that the councilors were asking about these tiny little changes like $500,000, $183,000. It- it showed that the budget is already quite lean if they're going in for $180,000 of changes.

Mack:
Yeah, I mean, in the grand scheme of the budget, 183 is not a lot. I mean, those little things add up-

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
... I guess, but there's probably not enough of them to make a material difference. You really gotta focus on your big line items if you want to move the needle on the property tax increase. Was it mostly new councilors, returning councilors that were asking for these shavings?

Stephanie:
(laughs) Well, everyone did ask questions, for sure. Um, the newer councilors were kind of asking more about those bigger bigger items that the last council would have kind of decided on and I assume didn't want to re-litigate. Um, and then the older coun- or like the... not the older councilors, the incumbent councilors were the ones kind of really targeting those tiny little changes from what I saw.

Mack:
So there's a couple of reports at play here that we'll link to in the show notes. Um, there, you- you know, you mentioned there was nothing super spicy.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
But we did hear that there's a surplus.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
And I was a bit confused about that at first.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
'Cause what we're hearing is that there's maybe about a $15.7 million surplus, but that's for 2025.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
And before you, dear listener, get all excited thinking, "Aha, that means we can have a lower tax increase," that's not what they're planning to do with it. Right, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
This is... Yeah, this is in reference to the 2025 budget, whereas they're deciding on things for the 2026 budget. So what happened in 2025 is that the city actually you know, handled its money pretty good and got like a- a little bit more revenue. Uh, more revenue from membership and admissions to city facilities, greater than expected EPCOR Power franchise fees more tax penalties because more property tax accounts had outstanding balances, that sort of thing. Uh, so at the end of the year, they're projected to have about $15.7 million extra than what they had bu- budgeted. But instead of putting that to a you know, a- a reducing the tax levy, what they're going to do instead is put it towards the financial stabilization reserve, which is, you've probably heard of it before. It's kind of... It's referenced as a rainy day fund. It comes up every time the- the city puts out a financial update because they're almost always saying, "The FSR is below its threshold, we have to work to bring it back up."

Mack:
You need to have a- a budget, a rainy day fund if you- if you run into hard times. And so if it gets depleted, you need to fill it up again. So just to give you a scale of the numbers, right? Uh, the city says that the minimum required balance is $142.9 million at the end of this calendar year, and we have $78 million in there. So we have raided the rainy day fund in recent years to deal with some of the cost pressures even though we've had property tax increases. So we need to get that back up somehow, and what you're saying is they're going to take this 15.7 and just stick it in the fund. Is that right?

Stephanie:
That's what they're proposing. It hasn't been 100% decided yet. Um, and so they would take that $15.7 million as well as $12.5 million from a special dividend from the EdTel Endowment Fund, and they're going to put it towards the financial- the FSR. Uh, now, there is a plan to pay back the FSR that council is working on. And originally, that was supposed to be finished in 2029, and then after that, they're going to use that money that they've been putting away every year, they're going to use that for a maintenance and renewal fund so that they can have like a dedicated fund to fixing roads and other city facilities. But if they're able to put this little surplus from this year, if they're able to put that away, they can pay down the FSR one year earlier, which means that they can start paying for maintenance and renewal one year earlier. All of this is very, very dull, but very important because if you haven't paid for stuff like the FSR and maintenance and renewal, you can't have fun stuff like a new rec center or whatever (laughs).

Mack:
Yeah, and I'm sure people are gonna be, you know, wondering, "Why can't we use that to lower the property tax increase?" People are struggling, you know, costs keep going up. We still have inflationary pressures. But we've taken quite a bit of money out of the FSR in recent years.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
And it is important to put that back in for when times get even more difficult and- and even rougher than they already are. So it seems to me like the right idea to go and just take that surplus that you were not budgeting for in the first place stick that in the FSR 'cause you'll- you'll need that in the future, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah. A little windfall maybe. I don't know if that's (laughs) the right way to, to, to, to use that word but yeah.

Mack:
An itty-bitty surplus as we said off the top.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
So not like a huge amount of money, but it does make a difference. So the, the FSR will still be in a depleted state and so they still have to follow this plan that you talked about to replenish it and get it back up to where it's supposed to be. Um, but yeah, I think y- you know what you said about, maybe a little bit boring but important, those sort of maintenance renewal things.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
I think we've seen in recent years that it costs more to deal with them later. You know, the sooner you get to that sort of preventative or, or rehabilitative maintenance, the, the less expensive it's gonna be in the future. Things seem to go up in price and you were saying before the show that Karen Tang was complaining about that.

Stephanie:
Yes. Well, so there's a couple of projects that are in the capital budget as emerging or, you know, new things that the city has to pay for. Some of these are projects that have been designed and now the estimated budget for what the project was going to be, now that they have the actual design, they're like, "Oh, it's actually gonna cost a few more million dollars." Or maybe the scope has changed or another thing was there's a new interchange on I think the on 137th Avenue and Anthony Henday because of provincial design regulations that I guess the city didn't know they were gonna have to use, it's more than doubled in price from $6.6 million to $14.3 million. So they do the design and they realize that they're actually gonna need some more money for the project. And now another one of those projects is the Walker Fire Station, so they now need about three million more dollars to cover the cost of construction because the design is now going to cost a little bit more, and they need another $10 million to add a emergency communications dispatch center to the project that wasn't gonna be in there before but now they've added it. So it's $12.9 million added on and this is what Councilor Karen Tang had to say about that.

Keren Tang:
I think it's not just that... It's not just the fire the fire stations, a lot of um, a number of the emerging items like the Windermere District Park I think I'm just not really seeing the urgency of that. I understand the school site piece, because, you know, there's obviously a school accelerator fund so that's, maybe I can see why. But for the rest you know, we always talk about everything, yes, is needed and, but do we need it right now? I'm not necessarily feeling compelled by that right now. Uh, in terms of the Walker Fire Station, it was a bit of a surprise partly because we approved $19.9 million, which is not a small number, you know, there's no... the ground hasn't been broken yet, I haven't seen any design, haven't seen much engagement on this either and now we're asking for an additional $12 million, that's a lot. And then similarly with, you know, the Athlone, it would have been opened this year but, like, where is that? You know, firehouses are really critical, they're essential services and we wanna make sure we meet the standards, especially when it comes to response time. But I would just worry around these infrastructure projects gets bigger and bigger through each budget cycle.

Stephanie:
So yeah, just a bit of a surprise but, you know, this is I guess what budget adjustment is for (laughs).

Mack:
I mean, that sounds like a big increase. I share her surprise, maybe and frustration. 19.9 to 32.8. Uh, how did we decide to add an emergency operations center into this that wasn't originally part of the design?

Stephanie:
That is something I do not know.

Mack:
Yeah. Shocking, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
That those sorts of things can happen, but this is, this is why people during the election were talking about, you know, we need to do a look at all of the city's infrastructure projects and make sure we have, like, sequencing and, and information about them because that's a sizable increase to get added to a project without anybody being able to understand exactly why. Like, I'm sure there's a good reason s- somewhere along the way, but, these decisions have knock-on effects for the financial impacts, of course.

Stephanie:
Yeah, 'cause there, so there's two fire stations that have increased budgets. The other one is in Athlone and it's an increase of $10 million and now it costs $28 million total and some of the councilors were like, "What would happen if we didn't increase the budget?" If, and, and Edmin said, "Well, Edmonton Fire-Rescue wouldn't be able to do its job." So it's pretty striking that they're con- that council is even asking that.

Mack:
I mean, I, it seems like council needs to understand is the problem that we're adding things to these projects after the fact or that our original design that we thought we approved was completely wrong?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Like, if they need those things and it wasn't included in the original design, what were we doing (laughs) when the project first came up and was approved, right?

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
Well, as I said, this isn't really an impact for 2026. Council is still talking about the 6.4% property tax increase for 2026. Administration says, you know, that is in, in alignment with what was proposed in the spring of 2025 and they outlined in their report, I thought, just a few interesting things, like, there's this $50-plus million structural variance, these are accounting terms for we have a deficit, we need to figure out how to cover it and that's what the tax increase is for. And they said they've addressed some of that in this budget adjustment, some of it in the previous adjustments but there's still $38.8 million in structural budget variances that need to be addressed and they said they have action plans to do that. And, you know, these, these action plans could involve changing the levels of service, adding new user fees, you know, there's any number of things they might do to try to address a deficit in one of the programs or m- or more of the programs. Uh, we'll put this in the show notes but Keith Gerlein from the Edmonton Journal had a column about this and I, I thought he, he pointed out something pretty funny which is that you know, one of the things is user fee increases and he says, quote, "Including, oddly enough, a new pet license fee for people who keep hens and bees. If we're coming after the chickens for extra cash, that's probably not a great indicator of prosperity."End quote.

Stephanie:
Instead of a cash cow, it's a cash chicken? Ooh, try saying that-

Mack:
A cash chicken, I guess. Yeah.

Stephanie:
Try saying that ten times fast. (laughs) Cash chicken. (laughs)

Mack:
(laughs) I don't think there's enough chickens to make a ton of money off of this. It just seems like a pretty you know, small potatoes kind of user fee to add on that isn't really-

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
... gonna dramatically change anything, except to make it even less appealing for people who might want to keep backyard hens, I suppose.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, there were in the report, it also talks about some other ongoing reductions that are recommended to help manage these structural budget variances and limit tax increases. Administration presented these half in private, half in the report. It was kind of confusing. They mentioned two examples of things that they were proposing to cut, and then they said, "We'll discuss the rest of these in private." The two things that they mentioned in the public report is a reduction of $400,000 for the corporate integrated data solution program as less funding is required than initially anticipated. I don't exactly know what that program is. It just seems like some sort of data thing. Another thing that I found a little more interesting was a reduction of $400,000 ongoing to the Anti-Racism High-Level Office subsidy because this funding can be reduced without a material impact to the overall program. This is kind of jargony, but they're... Wh- what do you have to say about that? (laughs)

Mack:
I think that's interesting, like you say. I mean, the anti-racism file, they're taking away $400,000, and they're basically saying because it won't really impact what we're doing, and it's like, okay, is that because... I would like a little bit more detail. You know, if I was a councilor, like, is that because we learned that what we thought we would need we don't quite need, or because we've decided we want to do less than we originally thought? Like, where is that $400,000 not needed? I mean, good that they're finding, you know, these sort of internal cost savings and, and and, and making those happen, but a bit surprising, concerning about why we have those in the first place.

Stephanie:
Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, we talk a- about, a lot about how the city is like this big ship that has all this inertia going forward, and you can make these little turns to barely change the direction, and this is kind of indicative. Like, the budget is such a good example of that because there's, it's such a humongous corporation with so much embedded in it that it's just really hard to, you know, even address anything.

Mack:
All right. So where does this leave us for the budget discussion, Stephanie? Where are we at in that process that we talked about previously?

Stephanie:
So they've asked a bunch of questions. Mayor Andrew Naick is such a diplomatic guy that before everything started, he's like, "Okay guys, if we get all of our questions done today, that means that we can have the rest of the week to work offline, work like in person one-on-one with city staff to form our motions." So he just was kind of like, "Let's try to get it done." So they're probably doing that as we speak, crafting motions to introduce next week, which would the first, second, third, and fourth, that's when they have time allocated to make actual changes to the budget, and then after that we should know what the actual tax increase is going to be at the at the end of the week.

Mack:
And we'll talk all about the things they propose next week.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
I just wanted to mention one other thing that I thought was interesting. I wonder if this came up in the conversation. There's stuff in this report, which I don't remember seeing regularly at budget adjustment time, about public engagement, and they said they did this survey in October to understand Edmontonians' current financial situation and their opinions on potential adjustments, and, you know, some of the key findings that I thought were particularly interesting, 24% of people who responded said they support the option to increase taxes more than 6.4%. That strikes me as high.

Stephanie:
Yeah. (laughs)

Mack:
Did that come up at all in the conversation? Or did they kind of skip over the engagement stuff anyway?

Stephanie:
Yeah, I don't think that anyone really brought that up, but that is surprising to me too.

Mack:
40% supported keeping the 6.4% with some service reductions and user fee increases. 42% supported lowering it with more significant reductions in service or, or increases in user fees. So just kind of interesting, especially given they found 51% of people who took the survey said they think their household financial situation will be more challenging within the next 12 months, so that's interesting. You could either look at those numbers and say, "That doesn't really add up," or I guess you could look at this and say even though a lot of people feel like they're gonna have a s- tough financial situation in the next year, they understand the importance of the services the city provides and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is and, and, you know, deal with a increased property tax increase. So we shall see what council decides when we get into that.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
All right. Well, let's shift gears. We were talking last week about Vision Zero quite a bit, and Vision Zero is back again this week on the agenda I see here Stephanie, because there's a new report about opportunities to expand municipal traffic safety. What what's up with these reports?

Stephanie:
Yeah. So earlier this year, council asked for a report potentially exploring like a new traffic safety team. I'm not sure if it was 100% explicitly related to the increase in traffic deaths but those have increased even more since then. I think we're at 31 people that have died in traffic this year. It's horrible. Uh, it's a record high. So this report goes into kind of two things. It, it talks about what has happened in Edmonton since photo radar sites were banned or mostly banned by the Alberta government, and it also talks a little-

Mack:
Or pro- progressively banned I think it is, right? Like, they've had you know, every time we do something-

Stephanie:
Rolled back.

Mack:
... rolled back, yeah.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
It talks also about the Vision Zero, so our progress or lack thereof on reducing traffic deaths. Uh, some of the numbers are just shocking. Research focused on understanding the impacts of the removal of photo radar shows the following trends. After a measurable drop in vehicles speeding in these photo radar sites in 2024, vehicles traveling over the speed limit rose again in 2025 by 10.8%. And like, it's gotten more severe too, because compared to 2024, the largest increases this year were related to extreme speeding, so going 20 to th- 29 kilometers per hour over the limit, that's seen an 87% increase and then doing even more, 30 kilometers plus above the limit has seen a 65.8% increase.

Mack:
They say this is pervasive, right? Like increased speeding at 82% of the city's monitored intersections. So on the one hand, this is not surprising at all. You take away the photo radar, the automated enforcement, you would expect to see speeding go up. Like we knew already that photo radar worked, it had an impact. But perhaps a bit surprising how much it's gone up and, and how m- like the severity of the speeding has gone up. I don't know that I would've guessed that exactly.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm. And a lot of the incidences include speeding. That's what this report says. So far in 2025, 31 people have died in traffic-related deaths. About half of those fatalities have involved speeding as a contributing factor according to Edmonton Police Service data. So speeding is is, is going up. Speeding also has contributed to a lot of deaths in traffic in Edmonton. So to address this, again, this is kind of a confusing document because it's not technically part of the budget, but it's being presented kind of alongside the budget. But basically, council has three options. One option is to do nothing and wait until the next four-year budget cycle when they will potentially, you know, build this team and then the other two have two different levels of peace officer enforcement. But the kind of package that they could do would include expanding peace officer traffic safety enforcement, continuing to advocate to get photo radar back, which who knows how effective that will be, enhance safe design of roads, so add more traffic calming, try to make the roads safer to drive on, and the last little action item is to increase funding to collect data, enhance winter safety, and improve response to safety issues, so that 311 issue that you mentioned a couple weeks ago.

Mack:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
So yeah, they either can do none of those things or the other two options for funding is to do all of those things, but then there's just different levels of peace officer enforcement.

Mack:
And m- all of these decisions impact a different reserve. We talked about the FSR earlier. There's the Traffic Safety Automated Enforcement Reserve and the, the first option you talked about where they just do the full recommendation here, including the peace officers, that's about $6 million, and if we did that, the reserve would be in a deficit position at the end of the year. That second option where they do some of the advocacy and traffic calming and those things, but not the peace officers, that's about $3 million. So we still end up in a deficit, just a smaller deficit in the reserve. And then the third option, as you said, is we don't do anything. The reserve would break even for 2026 in that case, but it's basically depleted and it's at zero. And when I was reading this, I just thought of that Upton Sinclair quote, right, which, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
It's not quite the same thing, but it's just like if you think about it, the fact that we always funded this based on ticket revenue is flawed. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like over time, if things are working, ticket revenue is gonna go down. The fund is always gonna get depleted. The province has basically accelerated us toward that future state where the fund is depleted with some of the limits that they've put in place and a- around the tools that we can use as a municipality. So I think that's kind of an interesting way to think about it. Almost like the city has been forced to reckon with how do we fund traffic safety in a way that doesn't rely on ticket revenue, right? That was eventually always gonna be a problem, but it's now a very real here and now problem. And ultimately, how do we fund things? We, we use property taxes to pay for them. And you know, even if we were in that other reality where we didn't lose these tools and eventually we did get down close to Vision Zero, like I the last mile problem is a very real one. It takes money. It takes a significant investment to get past that last mile. We are always probably gonna have to spend more money as a city if this is a thing that we prioritize and, and that we really care about. So I think that's essentially what council's got to grapple with here is like, how aggressively do we want to act on this and like just recognize that we're in a place where we were probably gonna be at some point, just faster maybe than we thought we were going to be.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
One other thing I thought about had some other listeners in the back of my mind when I was reading this is that, you know, you mentioned the 31 and it's awful and we want zero, that's why it's Vision Zero, like we, we don't want any. And I don't think when it comes to traffic safety, we necessarily should think about it as a per capita thing for that reason, we want to get to zero, but we have had 200,000 more people move here in recent years. The number of licensed drivers has gone up, according to the report, by about 17% since 2021. Uh, traffic is up at monitored intersections since 2019, 31%. So like there has definitely been upward growth pressure on Vision Zero. The report also says that from 2015 to 2019, Vision Zero stuff actually worked. Fatalities were down, serious injuries were down. And since the pandemic, it's gone the other way, right? Like, we've had uh, an increase again in fatalities in 2023, again in 2024, again now in 2025 and, you know, 52% of all those fatalities involving speed. So it's really quite concerning and I think this is a, this is a situation for council to really put their stake in the ground and say, "No, this is something we're gonna, we're gonna fund. We have to do something about this."

Stephanie:
Yeah. With all of those contributing factors that you mentioned, like with the increase in population, I also just think there's such a big part of this that the city can't control. I mentioned this last week, but I'll mention it again. Maybe this will be my new segment. Instead of Rapid Fire, we'll talk about all the times I almost died walking around Strathcona because I was walking on a marked rapid flashing beacon crosswalk and a woman almost drove through me, didn't even look up from the iPad in her center console, like that stupid screen she d- th- the, the crosswalk was flashing and she just didn't even have an awareness that there was a pedestrian in front of her. And, like, obviously city council has absolutely nothing to do with car design that incentivizes people to look off the road and onto the iPad. But sorry, that's not, that's I'll, I'll th- uh, the segment of me complaining about drivers is over. (laughs)

Mack:
No, I think it's a good thing to complain about. My, my daughter and I have now stopped biking for the winter. It's a bit cold for us. Uh, but we were biking until th- the start of this week and on the 103rd Avenue bike lane now going west, you know, you get to 109th Street, which is a very busy road, and I get that the, the lights, the intersections have changed recently because of the bike lanes, but I was also frustrated, Stephanie. My three-year-old can tell you that green means go, red means stop. She knows that. Drivers seem to struggle with this because the light turns green for bicycles and for turning, or for going straight, but it's clearly red for turning, like you're not supposed to turn on red and people do this all the time, and so it's quite dicey. Uh, maybe this will be my segment, which is yes but, so yes, the city doesn't have control over the all of those things, but they do have control over some things. I'll put in the show notes a link to this, but YEG Bike Coalition had a blog post last week actually about that 102nd Avenue detour onto 103rd and onto the bike lanes, and they focus in particular at the end there where the bike lanes kind of combine and go back into Railtown Park, which is where you're supposed to divert up to 102nd Avenue again, and I thought they had some pretty sensible suggestions, right? Like, we put all this money into making the separated bike lanes have separated infrastructure, like proper infrastructure on 103rd and N ave, wh- which I'm very grateful for, and then it's sort of like we just left the end of it at the, at the other end. We just sort of ignored the bottom, and so they're saying, "Well, let's just put a ramp there." Right now, you kind of have to turn into this one little on-ramp rather than just, like, pave a little ramp or put something down to go straight that would, it would allow people to not run into each other. We've run into a few bicycles, like not physically, but almost, right, because of this crunch point that you get into there. That's something the city could have done. If somebody actually biked that at rush hour, they would have seen, yeah, this is kind of not great. Maybe we do something about that. Um, their other suggestion in the YEG Bike Coalition post was instead of getting people into Railtown, like, have the detour be on 108th Street. I don't know if that's as sensible or if that makes sense. I mean, there's also construction going on around 108th Street with the, the MacLab tower and stuff like that, so it's not ideal, but it's worth thinking about. This is an example of what they talk about, which is 5A infrastructure, and I thought it was interesting, like, if you search for, for 5A infrastructure one of the first things that comes up, and maybe it's just because of where we are, is Calgary's list. They have a page of 5A infrastructure projects and what they've done. So 5As is always available for all ages and abilities, and it's this movement to make sure that as we're building out this infrastructure, that we really consider those 5As. I think it's really interesting.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know in w- in Edmonton, we're really big on the shared use paths, which is not considered 5A I don't think, and also pretty big on calling sharrows bike infrastructure.

Mack:
Paint.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
It's paint.

Stephanie:
It's paint.

Mack:
Well we'll hear more about what council decides to do probably next week you said, right, on this Vision Zero Traffic Safety Report?

Stephanie:
Yeah, it will be talked about in budget, but again, like I said, they, it could be pushed until next year when we're talking about the '27 to 20- to 30 budget, but I don't think it's going to be.

Mack:
Last for me on this then, Stephanie, they're struggling with how do we enforce stuff. Have you seen the throwing things at speeding cars in a school zone TikToks?

Stephanie:
No, but I am obsessed and I want to. (laughs)

Mack:
(laughs) It's, I, this shows you what the algorithm feeds to me, right? But there's this, I think it was in Dallas, Texas is where the guy went viral. He, he stands on the side of r- the, a road with a speed gun in a school zone.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
And he's got something in his hand ready to throw at the car.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
It's like a birthday cake, like a package of raw beef, and, and then he just chucks it at the car if the speed gun shows that they're speeding through the, the school zone, and then sometimes you see the car, like, stop and you, like, you don't know what's gonna happen or whatever. But, like-This is... (laughs) Maybe the city needs to get creative with its enforcement.

Stephanie:
S- seriously, or the citizens need to. I re- that reminds me, like, I love guerrilla, like, traffic enforcement because I remember seeing a few years ago, at a crosswalk. So, there was a thing where it's like, grab a flag at a crosswalk and go across and wave the flag around so that car see you, but then someone replaced those with a bunch of foam bricks. So if a car was coming and they didn't look like they were gonna stop, you could pretend you were gonna throw a brick at them. I need that.

Mack:
Oh, yes. Yes.

Stephanie:
I need to start carrying that around for all the millions of people who are determined to run me over in my neighborhood.

Mack:
I remember that, that brick thing, for sure.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. This guy took it to the next level and actually throws food at them, I suppose, but yeah.

Stephanie:
W- we do not condone this-

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
... on Speaking Municipally. We just think it's awesome. No. (laughs)

Mack:
And who knows? Maybe it's AI generated. You can't tell these days.

Stephanie:
Oh, yeah. True.

Mack:
We wanted to mention two other quick things before we wrap up for this week. One is, it's that time of year, not Christmas.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Yeah.

Mack:
End of construction season. Like, ugh, it's like clockwork. The city puts out a news release saying, "Our construction season is done," and everyone's like, "What are you talking about?"

Stephanie:
(laughs) Exactly.

Mack:
There's construction everywhere.

Stephanie:
Yeah, exactly. Like, that makes no sense at all. But I get, like g- 'cause technically ... Actually, I don't really get what, what they mean by that. But anyways, in this story, in the, in this press, press conference that they held was the accelerated construction timelines. We talked about it on the podcast before, but basically, they came up with a plan to have more annoying closures, but for a shorter amount of time.

Mack:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
So instead of, for example, having one lane closed for like two years, they were like, "Well, what if we close the whole intersection for six weeks and get it done really quickly?" Uh, short term pain for long term gain, as opposed to long term pain for long term gain. (laughs)

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
And so they were talking... I, I thought that was pretty interesting because that doesn't... It, it didn't really seem like something that, I don't know, Canadian cities really do, is like, like, "Sorry, we're closing this down for six weeks, and just to get it done quickly." Like how those Amish people will build a house in like a day.

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
Um ...

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
While we joke about, what does this mean, the end of construction season, right? It's just, I suppose it's all arbitrary, right? We put, pick a date on the calendar and say that things are wrapped up even though they're not. Uh, the Building Edmonton Capital Projects map, which you can go and check out, shows there are 226 projects on the go. So, it's not quite done.

Stephanie:
Wow.

Mack:
There's still a lot underway.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
And it says 95% are on budget and 78% are on schedule. So, I think that's actually a bit lower than I remember us talking about on the show in the past, uh-

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
... which is something to check into. Okay, and then you mentioned Valley Line. That was the other thing we wanted to mention quickly.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
I cannot believe this, but you have written down in the notes that the Valley Line has turned two.

Stephanie:
It was actually would have been November 4th because I remember very vividly waking up at 4:30 in the morning to go ride the Valley Line from the 102 Street stop first thing in the morning. Good times, good times.

Mack:
Yeah, that was fun. Troy had a cake and a ribbon and giant scissors, and yeah.

Stephanie:
Delish, so fun. But yeah so it's technically been open for two years now. And the CBC put out this little, you know, study about, about how it's been going. Um, it says that in 2024, the city counted more than 2.28 million rides on the Southeast LRT between January and October. In the same team, timeframe in 2025, counted 2.61 million rides, so a little increase. However it, it also goes on to say, "The Valley Line Southeast LRT's daily ridership averages about 9,300 trips, a far cry from the initial projection in 2014 of 31,500 passengers day from Infrastructure Canada." That was like when they were giving funding to Edmonton for this and they were saying, "Yeah, it's gonna have 31,000 passengers each day."

Mack:
I could be wrong about this, but I feel like some of that number was predicated on having the whole line open east to west, and not just the east, the southeast to downtown part. I could be wrong about that, but I s- I, something is tweaking in my mind about that.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
The city still said they're happy with the numbers they're seeing so far, and I see it looks pretty busy all the time. I think the frequency just really makes a difference, right? Uh, for, for how people choose to use that. In the CBC story that wa- was done about this, business owners maybe not quite seeing the impact.

Stephanie:
Yeah. So Table Top Cafe is right around ... Well, it's not actually even that close to any stations. It's, it's a bit of a bit of a trek, but it is also on the shared use path that connects the, the two. Uh, so Bryan Flowers, owner of Table Top c- uh, Table Top Cafe said the line is convenient for staff to get to work, but the LRT has not been a vessel for more customers. He said, quote, "We haven't really seen too much of a change one way or another. For the direct influence of people taking the LRT to come here, I haven't noticed that much of it." Which doesn't surprise me because it's not like you'd get much foot traffic for a board game cafe in an industrial park. Like I used to work at s- the Six Thirty Chad or Eight Eighty Chad office is right around there and not a fun place to exist outside of a car.

Mack:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I, I don't mean to demean Bryan Flowers' comments here.

Stephanie:
No.

Mack:
I think it, it makes sense. He's reflecting what he's seen in his business.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
I would question whether or not they're asking every person who comes through the door, "How did you get here today?" How do you even know whether they took the LRT or not?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Right? That's one thing. And then as you say, the way to increase traffic is to make it easier for people to get to the door, which is pedestrians and cyclists, not cars and trains and yeah, maybe to some extent, you know, buses. But, but also, as you point out, maybe not to industrial areas. It'd be interesting to know from some of the other business owners at other ends of the, of the line or other stations along the way if it's made a, if it's made a difference. I mean, certainly if I need to go to Millwoods, this is now-... the primary consideration, right? I mean, if, if I don't have another reason to have to need the car I'd much rather sit on the train and, uh-

Stephanie:
Oh, yeah.

Mack:
... you know, read a book or whatever and, and get all the way down there.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I rode the multi-use path all the way down to Mill Woods, Mill Woods Royal Pizza.

Mack:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
Shout out to my first job. I went there to meet my family a few months ago, and it was awesome. Like, very different experience obviously than riding on, like, the 83rd Ave or 102 Ave bike lane. Like, driving past, there's a part where you go past this car dealership, or truck dealership really, and there's just, like, 50 trucks right beside the (laughs) the shared use path. So it's a little bit of a weird experience. (laughs)

Mack:
It's like a fence made out of trucks or something.

Stephanie:
Yeah. (laughs)

Mack:
Uh, well, two years is a good time to reflect. I would say that I'm still annoyed at how much of our lo- low-floor LRT, that's how this was sold, is not low-floor.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
I mean, the bike lanes on 103rd Ave are more low-floor than this thing is.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
We need these stations all over. Davies is the complete opposite of a low-floor station. But on the other hand, I think having this train has been a fantastic thing for our city. It's undoubtedly made it possible for some of the growth pressures were seeing to be somewhat reduced, right, than from what they would otherwise have been in that, in that two-year period. So that's good. I'm sure that we'll see additional changes to the Valley Line in the next few years when we do get that west leg open. One thing, Stephanie, though, that seems like it's gonna be here forever is vehicles running into the trains.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
I think we had another one of those just this week in The Pulse.

Stephanie:
Yeah, it was a... I saw that it was a big semi and it, like, actually pushed the train off the tracks.

Mack:
Just crazy.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
I mean, we'll have a train all the way to the west, but we want to figure out how to stop cars from running into it.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Classic.

Mack:
All right. Well, that's it for this week. Uh, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review. That would be very helpful. Uh, Stephanie, we've got a lot more budget to get into next week. Are you excited?

Stephanie:
I sure am. It's going to be awesome. Stay tuned, everyone.

Mack:
All right. Until then, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.