Speaking Municipally

Troy returns to the podcast to talk about infill and zoning. Plus, we get his take on Happy Beer Street, and we look at an interim election audit report.

Here are the relevant links for this episode:

Audience survey
Troy Pavlek
Infill rezoning
Happy Beer Street
Election audit
This episode is brought to you by Accessible Acupuncture. Neuropathy and chronic nerve pain can affect daily living, sleep, mobility, and independence. Symptoms often include numbness, tingling, burning, and pain. At Accessible Acupuncture, our Doctor of Acupuncture — Dr. Melanie Morrill, Dr. Ac. — designs custom treatment plans to address both symptoms and underlying causes, support nerve health, and help patients return to their activities. Call 587-879-7122 or book online to schedule your consultation.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Mack Male
Co-Founder and CEO of Taproot Publishing Inc.
Host
Stephanie Swensrude
Stephanie is a curator and reporter at Taproot Edmonton. She attended NAIT's radio and television program and has worked at CBC, CFJC in Kamloops, and 630 CHED.
Host
Troy Pavlek
Apparently the TMZ of #yegcc.Governing myself accordingly since 2021

What is Speaking Municipally?

Taproot Edmonton presents a weekly discussion on key stories in municipal politics. We pay attention to City Council so you don't have to! Join us as we delve into conversations about the context surrounding decisions made at City Hall.

Mack:
Same infill arguments, different infill day. This week, Troy returns to the podcast and we're gonna get his take on all of the discussions about infill and rezoning that have happened at city hall. Plus, we're gonna talk a little bit about Happy Beer Street, and we've got a clip of Stephanie and I talking about the recent election audit. Hi, I'm Mack, and this is Speaking Municipally. Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, episode 343.

Mack:
It's a little bit different. Stephanie's away this week, and so we had recorded a little bit of stuff before she went away. And then because we knew that infill was going to be such a conversation this week with everything happening at committee with the public hearing, we thought we should get someone on here to talk about that who knows this and who has been following this topic for a long time. And so I'm really happy that we have co-founder Troy Pavlek returning to the show to help us do that. I put this in the show notes last week, but it was a bit late, Taproot is doing its audience survey right now. If you haven't filled that out, we'd love for you to do so, link. We're looking forward to having your response, so thank you for doing that.

Mack:
And before we get into the very busy episode this week with some guests, I get to read the ad this week. This episode is brought to you by Accessible Acupuncture where Dr. Melanie Morrell, Doctor of Acupuncture, treats neuropathy and chronic pain. Neuropathy and chronic nerve pain can affect daily living, sleep, mobility, and independence. Symptoms often include numbness, tingling, burning and pain. Melanie designs custom treatment plans to address both symptoms and underlying causes, support nerve health, and help you return to the activities you love. In the February 13th edition of The Pulse, you'll see the story of Elliott, who suffered from chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy after surviving testicular cancer. Now, he's taking the stairs with ease. "It was life-changing to have my mobility back," he says. If you're in pain, call 587-879-7122 to book a consultation or visit accessibleacupuncture.ca. Again, call 587-879-7122 or visit accessibleacupuncture.ca. Now, on with the show. Troy, long time no see.

Troy:
This is a podcast I'm on? What is Speaking Municipally? I'm not really familiar.

Mack:
It is the most popular Politics podcast about municipal affairs at city hall. Troy Pavlek, co-founder of the podcast, welcome back to the show.

Troy:
Good to be back.

Mack:
What have you been up to? How's the short form video world treating you?

Troy:
I mean, like, if someone has been following the short form video word, world, they'll note that I didn't produce any content for, like, three and a half weeks 'cause I was renovating my basement, and that is a thing that I'm able to do now with all of my mounds of free time. And you know what, Mack? I've had my bed in the dining room for four and a half years in this basement renovation process, I worked very hard for several weeks renovating my basement, and do you know what happened?

Mack:
Bed's still in the office?

Troy:
Yeah, I didn't finish. Bed's still in the dining room.

Mack:
Dining room, yeah.

Troy:
I burned my entire vacation renovating and still feel like I'm nowhere. Which, if it isn't an apt metaphor for politics in the City of Edmonton, I don't know what is.

Mack:
Ugh, just keep doing the same thing over and over and maybe hope for a different result.

Troy:
That, well, that's what we did this week at council, so big bang boom.

Mack:
Okay, so the newsworthy stuff this week was about infill, we did a whole bunch of preview about this last week, but council or committee actually had a two-day public hearing this week, they heard from about 70 speakers. I'm guessing you didn't watch all 70, because no one actually needs to listen to all 70 people. I mean, you get the gist from probably three or four.

Troy:
If that. That's, that seems high, but sure.

Mack:
But you paid attention, right? Give us your overall takeaway from committee this week.

Troy:
Well, shockingly, some people like infill and others do not. So This is a really novel takeaway. I think at the end of the day, what it was what we knew it would be, which is there's a contingent of the population that says, "It's too much, too fast. Neighborhoods are changing too quickly." There's a contingent of the population that says, "We need infill for fiscal, environmental and social reasons." And then, there's, you know, the smattering in the middle who say, "I support infill, but I support the right infill." And over the decades, it's never quite clear what infill is right and what infill is wrong. And council had to kinda sit there and listen to all of it knowing full well that, like, hot take, none of what was being said mattered. This was a situation where if this is a consultative exercise, it was set up to fail because the result of the consultation can't have affected the outcome materially, at least if our governors are doing their job and, you know, considering evidence and considering good policy production. So, that's where we were at after burning several days, talking about it.

Mack:
When you say that it won't matter, do you mean because council is unlikely to approve the amendments that administration put forward?

Troy:
Yeah, so essentially, what we were trapped in, and, you know, you can look at what was actually put on the table by administration, which is, they said, "Here's some adaptations that we recommend." And I did note that most of the coverage said, "Administration recommends-"…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
You know, going from eight to six, and I don't know that it's quite clear that administration was recommending that insofar as council asked for a report, and based on the parameters that council said, "This is what administrations provide." It's So it's a little bit different than administration coming and saying, "Hey, we shopped around bids and we recommend hosting the Olympics."

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
But the, basically what was on the table is, what I kinda call the four by stealth. It's, there were three options. There was a unit count reduction, so eight to six on a particular lot. There was unit size increases, so-Basically increasing the minimum square footage of a unit to about 90 square meters. And then there was some things with the RSM zone and, like, bonusing around transit stations, which is nodes and corridors and bumping it up.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
And the unit size increase, I think is the most insidious one because what that would get you is already across the city, you can't build eight units on most lots in the city. It The dimensions just physically don't allow for it. The only reason we've had such an influx of six to eight-plexes so far is because when it became legalized, developers will purchase the lots that can accommodate that. So there's a bit of, like, confirmation and selection bias involved in this early thing.

Mack:
And when you say flood of six and eight, I mean…

Troy:
Yes.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Fewer than 0.5% of…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
The, lots in the MNO former area have been redeveloped. But, you know, one of the options with unit size increases functionally would make it so that four would've been the maximum on any lot, just because as unit sizes increase and we know that, like, the maximum building size can't increase, it means that just fewer units are permittable. We also heard from people like, Edmonton's Neighbourhood United and the Residential Infill Working Group basically saying we need to, like, split the building. Instead of having massing, we'd have one building fore and one building aft.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Kind of like…

Mack:
Four and two, right?

Troy:
Yeah, super garage suites or whatever. (sighs) That was never gonna happen. That's not a thing. And so what you had going into it is you had these recommendations, but all of this comes in the context of July when City Council approved some new changes to zoning bylaw.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
And we haven't seen the effect of that. We've heard it called around the table as, like, multiplexes 1.0 and multiplexes 2.0. Haven't seen a 2.0 yet, right? The, that has the, you know, fewer doors facing the side lots, a little bit of reduced depth. And, you know, when that new bylaw was passed, developers had to redo their plans, redo engineering, re-get approvals. In many cases that involves re-upping their financing and changing loan parameters. Takes time.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
So a shovel hasn't really hit the ground on one of those 2.0, multiplexes. So council is sitting there saying, "Look, we already heard feedback and made adjustments based on community feedback, and we've not seen a single one of those appear. So all of the complaints we're hearing are based on outdated information that is out in the community. So why would we make another change right now? Which would also involve none of those 2.0s getting built, because another change now would mean the things that aren't in the ground just yet would have to go once again through that redevelopment process."

Mack:
So for all the people who hate red tape, it sounds like a really bad idea to make them go through that whole process again.

Troy:
Lot of red tape.

Mack:
So if we don't need these things yet, because we haven't even seen the previous changes come into effect, I wonder also if you feel like this is just a complete waste of time because we had an election and it seems like overwhelmingly we did not vote out councilors who supported infill? Or do you think that argument doesn't really hold weight anymore?

Troy:
I, you know, I made that argument shortly after the election that, you know, we broadly elected an infill happy councilor.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
And it's kinda true. It's a disingenuous argument to make. I recognize that it's a little bit disingenuous to make it. Voting turnout was very low.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
People are mostly uninterested. People don't really have a firm grasp of municipal issues, and a lot of provincial issues got completed, plus there was the party thing that was To call this an infill mandate, I will say it, because it's not untrue…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
But is it explicitly unshakeable mandate? No. What was kind of unshakeable though, Andrew Knack did win. And Andrew Knack, man who keeps his promises, promised that he would fast track infill changes and coming back with, zoning bylaw changes early after the election. And so he won, and he did, and here we are. And this is Andrew Knack in a nutshell. You know, he's going to do the process, he's going to do the consultative exercise, even if responding to Facebook comments is a waste of time.

Mack:
Yeah. He's very consistent, right, in his approach and the things he says he's gonna do, and he's been very consistent in saying that we need to Infill's a part of our future, it's here, it's not going anywhere, but we need to make some changes, right?

Troy:
Yeah.

Mack:
So, very consistent in that. All right, well, were there any new arguments you heard this week?

Troy:
Well, interestingly, and I made a video about this as well, most of the arguments were old arguments, right?

Mack:
Okay.

Troy:
All of the arguments we heard, you know, massing is too much, it blots out the sun, it's going to cause parking issues…

Mack:
Changes the character of our neighborhoods.

Troy:
Changes Exact same. I found every single one of these quotes from 10, 12 years ago about lot splitting for, skinny homes. Single family, skinny homes. And so, you know, there's some amount of, okay, apples and oranges. This is two units versus eight units. But also, you know, is it that different? If it's the same arguments and we didn't see those arguments come to fruition, why do we expect it to be any different here? Obviously, you know, okay, but what if it's 100 units? You can make the slippery slope argument. But broadly, no, we didn't really see any new arguments here other than, "No, guys. Really real this time. Our neighborhoods are being destroyed." and interestingly, a lot of the speakers we saw at council were the same speakers.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
A resident from Aspen Gardens I saw at the public hearing. He was arguing for restrictive covenants to block eight-plexes. You know what he was doing when skinny homes were there? Arguing for restrictive covenants to block skinny homes. It's the same playbook by broadly the same players, and-That's, I think, what council has to go into this. Thinking is, there is a non-trivial number of speakers that did not speak in good faith.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
And as a councilor, you have to hear from the public, you have to respect the public, and you have to know when the public is pissing on your leg and telling you it's raining. And there was a lot of that going on. I don't think we heard any new arguments, but we did hear a lot of new evidence, right? So we are now two and a half years into the zoning bylaw. We have seen the positive effect. Edmonton has the second lowest inflation in the country in our last fiscal update. We know that our rents are being controlled. We know that we are having a huge influx of population and we are weathering the housing storm better than many Canadian municipalities. And that's because of ZBR.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
So that is, you know, at least a data point.

Mack:
One thing that did seem a bit different, even though there's the same people making the same arguments, is I saw you point out a few people maybe said the quiet part out loud.

Troy:
Yeah.

Mack:
Tell us about that.

Troy:
Well, like we had people explicitly say, "This is about renters." One speaker said, "I think renters should have to live by busy roads. They shouldn't get to live in the interior communities," which is some really gross overt redlining stuff.

Mack:
Totally.

Troy:
Now credit where it's due, the speaker was a bit caught off the cuff by that overt question. Perhaps he was flustered and misspoke and doesn't actually believe in total segregation by class. But he may not have, others did…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
Very explicitly. And a lot of this is about renters don't care about their communities, renters don't care about, the buildings, renters leave trash strewn everywhere. I listened to CBC Radio where renters were compared to rabid packs of coyotes. I don't know how that made it to air.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
It's, and it's pretty overt. And, I mean, specifically for me, it's quite acute because I'm in the Mature Neighborhood Overlay. I'm in a 1940s semi-bungalow that I bought as a starter home. I, you know, made it. This is the starter home that everyone talks about. The corner lot beside me sold last year and conceivably could have been an infill.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
But you know what it is? It's renters in that house, just like it has been renters in that house for the past 14 years. Multiplexes aren't the only things that are rented.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
All of these core mature neighborhood homes have renters just as much as homeowners. I think when we reduce it away from people, we're pretty making, we're making a pretty overt statement that it's like this is a class-based system. It's not a far leap to say only landowners can vote. Like, and that's just not a place that anyone on council wants to go to, and we've moved far past that. So it does really dilute the value of a lot of arguments when it comes from a place of overt classism, especially, you know, Andrew Knack campaigning for mayor on like, "Edmonton's a city of newcomers. We need to support this." It's gonna fall on deaf ears if you say, "Yeah, but only people who can afford a $500,000 mortgage-"…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
"… deserve to have a voice at the table."

Mack:
Right. Absolutely. One other thing I wanted to ask you about, where it did seem like there was broad agreement, and when I say broad agreement, I mean even Lauren Gunter agrees, private tree bylaw. I know…

Troy:
Yeah.

Mack:
City administration does not seem to support this. Everyone else seemed to, even the Residential Infill Working Group folks seemed to be in favor of it. Obviously the, you know, Nature Conservancy folks are in favor of it. But did you hear anything different? Do you think council will actually make this happen?

Troy:
Yeah, 100%. So if I was to make a prediction of what's gonna happen in, it's not next week, the next, when this goes to council, because it was requisitioned up to council, I think we're gonna stay at eight. I think we're going to throw a bone to people who've complained about, massing or height. Maybe, you know, reduce half a meter to one meter, so from 10.5 to maybe, like, 9.5 or 9.8, or perhaps shave another, like, couple percentage points off the depth that it can go into a lot. Something like that as a concession, and then we're gonna have a tree bylaw.

Mack:
Private tree bylaw…

Troy:
The thing is…

Mack:
We're talking about.

Troy:
Yeah, private tree bylaw. Tree bylaw is not gonna do anything at all, and this is why administration doesn't support this tree bylaw, because it's green tape in this case, You can't prevent a homeowner from removing a tree, right? The intention of this tree bylaw is saying, "Pretty please, if you're building a building and it doesn't require taking down a tree, don't take it down." Well, in general, developers don't want to take it down. Private trees, especially mature trees, add exceptional value to the sale of homes. You know, you have a 60-year mature elm or spruce on a lot, adds 20 to $80,000 to the sale price.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
They don't want to be tearing down trees they don't have to. But even more than that, it's unenforceable. I, my neighbors last year, they own their home, and there was an elm that could have been saved, seven-year elm, but it was kinda getting in the business of the houses, cut it down. And that is…

Mack:
Wouldn't it just be like other bylaws? Wouldn't it just be complaint, like you as a neighbor complain that they took it down?

Troy:
Yeah. And I, as a neighbor, complained that they took it down, and then they can say, "You know, a branch-"…

Mack:
It was sick.

Troy:
"… hit my window-"…

Mack:
Or whatever, yeah.

Troy:
"… when it was, and I was nervous about, it coming down." Also, just, like, given the lot sizes, any tree with just the root spread can be at risk of damaging your foundation, right? You, there is no lot on the City of Edmonton where you couldn't argue that a tree needs to be taken down for the good maintenance of your property. And so the bylaw, in effect, becomes toothless. It becomes a virtue signal, and I love trees. I'd say, sure, put the bylaw on the books. Maybe it convinces some fly-by-night developers who aren't thinking of full cost accounting of trees to keep a couple. Maybe it doesn't. But at that point, the concession is really you have people like the Residential Infill Working Group who are saying, you know, "I care about nature, I care about light, I care about our mature canopy," and this is throwing them a bone, even if the bone is kinda brittle and rotted and not gonna do anything.

Mack:
So, you think council will do it just for that reason? A little bit more virtue signaling and it seems like the cost of this then would be pretty low, ultimately.

Troy:
Yeah. It's, like, and it won't do absolutely nothing. Is there a cost to having something on the books that, you know, might be unenforceable, might be another, like, encumbrance? Yeah, but overall, the political win of saying, "We all support trees and we make sure that infill doesn't hurt our trees," it's gonna be a political win for council that gets them over this hump of, "We heard you, we heard you about the cost of infill on trees and we're doing something about it."

Mack:
Well, if your prediction comes to pass next week, or when ever, when this goes to council, in the next couple of weeks, how will that leave you? Will you be happy with where things are at?

Troy:
Yeah. I mean, like, no one's gonna be happy with this, but what would make me unhappy here is not committing to something that we have done exceptionally well. There's not a lot of things we do very well in Edmonton, but legalizing varieties of housing is something that we are world-renowned for. We are, especially in North America, leading the pack and, you know, we're not leading the pack on sprawl, we're not leading the pack on recycling. We can no longer boast about our 90% diversion anymore.

Mack:
It's true.

Troy:
This is one thing where we had a plan, we executed on that plan, and it worked. So I'm okay with concessions here. I'm okay with, okay, shave a little bit off the top. If they wanted to do a little bit of architectural rules lawyering, okay, sure, we can do that. But the core value of flexibility in housing construction, that's something that has to stay. And one thing that just, like, gets lost in these arguments is we debate about nodes and corridors and we heard administration talk about nodes and corridors a lot. There's, like, six developers in the city that can do elevators, right? When you have a six floor apartment, you need elevators, you need concrete, you need parkades. There's a limited number of developers that can do that, just physically. There's a cost to all of it. And when you concentrate all your development and all your infill aspirations in just those along the corridors, we don't have the capacity to build it, we don't have the expertise to build it, and it drives up cost. The big thing that makes eightplexes and sixplexes and fiveplexes so accessible, any Joe Blow developer can build one. It's a residential house. You know, with, like, separate furnaces and firewalls…

Mack:
Sure.

Troy:
And stuff. But there's no, like, specific construction prowess or engineering that you need to build those types of homes. And that has been the key to unlocking more infill. And that's where if we really clamp down on this place where we've seen success, you know, we're going to, we're gonna be regretting it when, Edmonton grows to two million people in, you know, 15 years and there's nowhere for them to go.

Mack:
Yeah, we don't wanna be Calgary and repeal the whole thing. I think I saw Councilor Clarke, Reid Clarke, talk about nodes and corridors and basically say, "If we wanna build more there, we need to incentivize it." And it sounds like that's a little bit what you're saying too. If it costs more and there's fewer people that can do it, but we want development there, what's the carrot to get them to do it?

Troy:
Yeah. And I mean, the other thing to consider that we don't is nodes and corridors means nodes and corridors. If we're saying nodes and corridors are the choice, well, there's a little neighborhood on the Valley Line West LRT called Glenora. If Glenora wants to have seven floor apartment buildings, okay. Say that, Glenora, and we'll move right in. The nodes and corridors is often, when it's used by anti-infill proponents…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Is used as a later-us problem. "Oh, let's just do nodes and corridors," knowing that nodes and corridors is kind of impossible or nebulous in the future, and they can oppose it later. You know, Windsor Park famously, a node and corridor by the hugest education hub in, the province of Alberta, famously opposes apartment buildings all the time when it is a prime candidate for development. But we'll see fierce opposition there. So, you know, the whole nodes and corridor plan, it's kinda nebulous. It's also, I won't say racist, at the very least classist. It's redlining, right? We know that there are health outcomes for living near a busy road.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
There's smog, there's noise, there's a whole host of negative outcomes. Why are we concentrating if we're talking from a purely public health perspective, and we could put…

Mack:
Putting the most people to live in there is…

Troy:
Yeah.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
It…

Mack:
Seems at odds.

Troy:
That is objectively a bad choice. If we're also talking about light, it's the same thing with, like, tiered things.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Shouldn't the, apartment buildings be in the center of neighborhoods with the lower buildings on the fringes? Wouldn't that give the most light available? Eh, these are things that, like, you know, need not be considered because, again, not.5% of the lots in a residential neighborhood are being redeveloped.

Mack:
All right. Well, just recap for us again, your prediction next week if this is coming back to council.

Troy:
So, I mean, my prediction is influenced by, I have talked to some people, so I do have some inside baseball knowledge…

Mack:
Sure.

Troy:
Of what's coming. And I was about to say my first prediction is that they roughly stay the course. And-One of the conditions of me getting this information was they said explicitly, "You cannot use the words 'stay the course'." "Don't say that."

Mack:
And you're such a rule follower, Troy.

Troy:
And I'm such a rule follower, so…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
You know what? Leaks, legally. But I think it is worth noting that council won't be, quote-unquote "staying the course" because that's not what's happening, right? Stay the course implies that, you know, we're dug in and we've got this thing and we've plotted and we can't change the route. In fact, council is saying, "We've got a map going. We're constantly making adjustments and we're waiting for those to happen." So, they are not making changes right now that would negatively impact the outcome of the changes that they've already had. And one thing that I'll explicitly be watching is councilors like, for example, Aaron Rutherford and Erin Paquette, who a couple weeks ago, voted in favor of the Kettle Lakes plan…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
Going forward without coming back to council. And some of the arguments you heard there were developer certainty, you know? "We can't change these plans out from underneath developers." Well, we heard loud and clear that already council has somewhat undermined developer certainty on infill by making these changes back in July. For councilors like Erin Paquette and Aaron Rutherford to vote to severely change the, context of infill would be rank hypocrisy, in the context of the Kettle Lakes decision. So, I think that should be in the back of their minds. I don't know that rank hypocrisy has ever stopped a politician from voting a particular way.

Mack:
No.

Troy:
But it is, it is something that I'll be watching closely, is, "Okay, I've heard you about developer certainty. Did you actually mean that? Or was that what you were saying to get this one plan approved?" And so, if we are really, truly wanting to support developer certainty and make sure that we're getting those development dollars and making sure we're encouraging that all these housing dollars go to building housing, we can't make substantial changes at this point in time. It just wouldn't be sensible.

Mack:
Well, we'll keep an eye on that and, maybe we'll come back to you again, Troy, for your take after they make that decision. Troy, since we got you here, I wanted to ask you about one other thing that committee did decide this week, which is to endorse the creation of a entertainment district at Happy Bier Street. And I know this is close to home for you So you must be overjoyed about this news.

Troy:
Just like we say it's the Booster Juice Recreation Center in Terwilliger, say its full name, it's 70 Great Presented By Happy Bier Street. It's…

Mack:
With the, with the numeral eight, right?

Troy:
Yeah, with the numeral eight.

Mack:
Like, GR8. Yeah.

Troy:
We're T9 texting…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
The name. You know what? As much as I lambast the name, which I have lambasted, ever since Happy Bier Street was and I was involved with the community league at the time. Like, I remember them floating and I said, "Love the idea, hate the name."

Mack:
You don't like Happy Bier Street?

Troy:
It is very dumb. It's a very dumb name. It's Happy Bier Street. It's so trite.

Mack:
Like, are there sad beers? There's not Beer's always happy, isn't it?

Troy:
Yeah, and I mean, like, one of my biggest problems with it is first that almost all of the breweries, restaurants, everything that's involved in Happy Bier Street, they're on avenues. There's nothing that fronts the north/south streets.

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
And it's like, also, you know, a good five by ten by twelve sort of block area. It's a, it's not a street. It's a district. Happy Bier District? Maybe. But I digress. The name's dumb. The plan's great. And you saw Mayor Andraniuk talk about this when the media asked him. There was no sort of like hemming and hawing about, "Ooh, let's consult more. Let's determine …" He's like, "No. This is a great idea. Let's do it."

Mack:
Let's just do it. Yeah. This is what we said, I think, back on the podcast when it very first came up, right? Was like, "Why wouldn't we do this?"

Troy:
Yeah.

Mack:
Like, make it happen.

Troy:
The one thing I will say is there is, whenever we do something, what about the parking complaint…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
That comes up. And it is very easy to dismiss the what about the parking on this street because there's like maybe four street parking stalls and a lot of them are like 15 to 30 minutes. Like, it's not a big deal.

Mack:
There is a parking lot there though, right?

Troy:
There's a parking lot.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
And so the parking lot is trash. If it even drizzles, there's like…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Six foot puddles. It's, blight. But it provides like 15, 20 stalls. Like, it's not nothing. Absolutely not worth avoiding doing this plan, but I will concede in this point the what about the parking people have a measurable loss in here. It is, it is not nothing in this regard. But from the city's surveys, how do you access Happy Bier Street? I walk there, I cycle there, I take public transit there, or I'm in a vehicle as a passenger. And there remains tons of parking in the area. The closure area is just, again, an avenue. And it's just the one block from, 99th to 100th on 78th. And this is something that has closed several times for like I don't know if calling it a farmer's market is the right thing. A stall…

Mack:
It's like a block party.

Troy:
Based sales thing.

Mack:
Right? Yeah.

Troy:
Yeah. One of my favorite times was actually I was stopping for a car repair because there's 11 billion car repair shops in that area.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
You can take your pick of them. And I was, one of the, my regular mechanic was too busy, so I just went a block to another one and dropped it off and I was walking home. I'm only about, you know, ten blocks away from this location. And as I was walking through, I'm like, "Oh, what's this?" I heard music, I saw vendors, and I'm like, "Oh, this is cool." I bought some cookies, I sat, listened to some music, and then, you know. And I'm like, "You know what? I'm hungry." And before I walked home, I grabbed Flatboy Burgers and walked home.

Mack:
Nice. Yeah.

Troy:
And so, like, that is, like…serializing for me, it's like, this is the vibrancy that we want in the neighborhood. People say, "Oh, well, I have to drive to this place." You don't, right? This is for people in this neighborhood to experience life and culture at the street level, and for the Happy Bier Street people, the main advantage of the entertainment district is it just makes permitting easier.

Mack:
Absolutely.

Troy:
It's a reduction in red tape to do this more frequently. So send it. I'll love it, and you know what? When I need to go to, Flatboy and pick up a burger, I'll bike there, or I'll park half a block away…

Mack:
Right.

Troy:
And still walk right in.

Mack:
Fantastic. Well, I'm very excited that they're gonna move forward with this. I presume council's gonna just rubber stamp this and it'll go ahead, so…

Troy:
There's literally no way it doesn't go forward. And one actual, really interesting thing that differentiates this from like Rice Howard Way and other things…

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
Is like we talk about, you know, Edmonton wanting to revitalize downtown, so we're doing an entertainment district to try to encourage people. This wasn't that. The city had no ambitions to make an entertainment district on 78th.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
The businesses got together and said, "We see you have this legislative tool. Please use it here." And the city's like, "Okay."

Mack:
"Sure."

Troy:
When we talk long term about Edmonton developing unique and business supporting policy, this is the story. It's like the city builds a toolbox and says, "Okay, let us know what you want from this toolbox and how we can support you, and we'll support you." So when this goes forward, and I say when, it's gonna be a really good news story of we have developed tools and we've allowed businesses to use them, and it adds to positive outcomes for the communities, for the businesses, and for the city as a whole because we've added livelihood and business to this area.

Mack:
Sounds like a win-win-win.

Troy:
A win-win-win.

Mack:
Last week, when Stephanie and I were recording the episode, it was a long one. We had a whole bunch of stuff on the notes to prepare for, and we just felt like it was gonna be too long of an episode, so we saved a couple of things for this week, and I wanna play one of those segments for you now. We had a conversation about the election audit that happened recently at Audit Committee. So here's our conversation about what council heard. Stephanie, the election is long past, I think, for most people. Nobody's really thinking about election these days, but it did come up at council recently, right?

Stephanie:
Yes, so both the city auditor and Edmonton Elections released these interim reports about what went wrong during the election. Because as we know, not only was election day, you know, long lines, people didn't really know what they were doing. They were adapting to this new provincial legislation that banned voting tabulators. But then also in the days after, there was all this chaos. Like listening to these reports, I was getting a little bit of like flashbacks thinking about how stressful that was. But I wanted to talk about this because they provided some answers to some of these mishaps, and it, I think it's important to explain kind of exactly what happened, right?

Mack:
Is it, is it more complicated than the province made a ridiculous decision to change the rules? Isn't that the heart of the matter?

Stephanie:
Okay, so the, I mean, yeah. Yes, and that's why these interim reports from the actual bodies, the city auditor and the Edmonton, and the Edmonton Elections, all of the reports say what's in their control is better training essentially.

Mack:
Okay. Okay.

Stephanie:
You know, that's really all they could do. But a couple of the councillors asked some questions about some of these mishaps, like so the There were two kind of crazy things, at least in my opinion, that happened, in the days following the election, 'cause we remember, we were I was refreshing. The votes weren't coming in. And then the first kind of crazy thing that happened was that there was a recount in, ward Sipewiniwak. Of course, we all remember that Toop Parmar was six votes behind her Better Edmonton competitor, Daryl Friesen, and then they called a recount and she was all of a sudden 600 votes ahead. And reporting at the time was just that, "Oh, she's six votes behind, so we're gonna do a recount," but then I found out this week that wasn't 100% true, and I thought this was a super interesting quote from returning officer Eileen Giesbrecht. "I won't say that everybody gets the same amount of votes at every voting station, but when you start to see anomalies, it does make you question it. I didn't have a computer system to go back to. I had to actually go back and look at the papers. I wasn't sure if it was an administrative error or technical error. I didn't have the information I needed to check and release confidently," and so she called the recount. And they explained exactly what happened and like how this mistake happened, and essentially some employee of Edmonton Elections mixed up the list of the handwritten vote counts, and all of Toop Parmar's votes went to Roger Koch, who only ended up getting like maybe 1,000 votes, and Toop got like 6,000 votes. So, Eileen Giesbrecht was like, "This seems wrong."

Mack:
"Hang on a minute," yeah.

Stephanie:
"Yeah. I don't know, maybe Roger Koch campaigned really hard near this elementary school." Who knows? But no, she saw that, and so I think, I just think it's interesting that this like human error was caught by human intuition.

Mack:
Interesting.

Stephanie:
You know what I mean?

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
And then there was a second kind of, wrench thrown into things also on October 22nd. This was the Wednesday, I believe, after the election, so again, we didn't even have the full, like the full answers until Wednesday. John Morgan, the councillor for ward Ipikokni'kai'otisk inquired about the announcement that some ballots cast at Kehewin School had not been properly accounted for, and that the ballots could impact the outcome of the race for that ward. So, Giesbrecht said that in this case, the problem stemmed from legislation, new legislation, that required election workers to store kind of almost junk in ballot boxes essentially. The legislation requires election workers to store spoiled ballots, election forms, and additional paperwork in ballot boxes, which caused confusion when cataloging the boxes later, because every single box needs to be like kinda stamped and checked and tracked where it goes to make sure that we get every single vote counted, so that caused some confusion, and that's why the-… recount needed to happen.

Mack:
Rather than storing these in some other kind of box, they would more, be more easily distinguishable from the actual ballots, I guess that's what we're to understand?

Stephanie:
I'm kind of in disbelief that they'd be like, "Yes, let's put the spoiled ballots in a ballot box."

Mack:
That looks like the other ones that are supposed to be counted? Yeah.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I don't know. They didn't go in, I'm a little upset that they didn't go super into in depth during the conversation about like Hold on, can we, can we rewind there? But, you know, sometimes that's all you get at council.

Mack:
Well, this is an interim report, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah, so it was an interim report, the auditor and Edmonton Elections are working on more in, more in-depth analysis, and for 2029, Eileen Giesbrecht said they're going to do something very different, especially with advanced voting stations, but she said doesn't want to get too ahead of herself, so didn't say too much about it. They do start planning for the election, like, they're already planning for the 2029 election, which, makes me, sick to my stomach because…

Mack:
Ah.

Stephanie:
I'm like, "I don't I can't!" but yeah.

Mack:
That doesn't seem wise to me, to be planning for a, an election in 2029 when we'll for sure have a provincial election before then and there could be other changes. You know, I saw Councilor John Morgan following this audit committee meeting, talking about how they wanna see the province bring back vote tabulators. It's been pretty consistent that municipalities found the loss of tabulating machines to be expensive and unnecessary, complicated things. If there's a change in provincial government, I would anticipate that this would be a change before the next municipal election as well, and so maybe the returning officer doesn't want to plan for the current conditions, given that we might see a different situation four years from now. I get that it's an interim report, maybe they didn't go quite as in depth, but it also is one of those things like, well, council is elected and they've moved on and they're down to business, so we don't need to spend a whole bunch of time revisiting the past.

Stephanie:
Why I wanted to talk about this on the podcast is because potentially these issues could have put, called into question the integrity of our elections, and it's important to go back and close the loop on these things to be like, "This is what actually happened." I mean, I think that these were mistakes that were unfortunate and it would have been better if they didn't happen, but I don't think that I, no one was interfering to get John Morgan and Tu Parmar elected.

Mack:
I think you're right, it's an important point. That's not the situation here. These were, these were mistakes that were made, there was a reason these mistakes were made, they've identified that. It sounds like everybody took the correct actions at the time. You know, calling a recount is one of the things the returning officer has the authority to do, she did. We got the right person, the person with the most votes elected to city council. So, I think you're right, it is good to have confidence in our election process. It was frustrating at the time for everybody involved, I'm sure. And I'm not, I'm not certain that this kind of a report will put all of that at ease. I think it'll really depend on what that plan is for the next municipal election. What does that look like? And how do we have confidence in that new plan? If it is the same situation as this last election, and we're not allowed to use vote tabulating machines, then I think there's some practical things they will have learned that…

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Could be put into place and they can explain that. If it's a new situation, maybe we have the machines back or not, then there's a whole set of other things that they'll need to do to try to convey that this is a trustworthy process. And it won't really matter what happened in 2025 in that case.

Mack:
Well, a little bit of a different episode this week, but I think that was super interesting. My thanks to you, Troy, for jumping in and joining us as a guest. We said back in the fall when we last spoke that occasionally you'd be a guest when there's something relevant, and it seemed like this week was a great week to have you on. So, I appreciate that. And as our guest, here's your opportunity to plug something. What do you want to plug? And it can't just be come help you finish the basement.

Troy:
I will plug, I do a lot of stuff on the internet these days, and I know that, like, it's a different beast from podcasting. Not everyone followed me over. There's many places you can find, and I've documented them all on troypawluk.ca in a nice little table. So go there and you can find me in all the places or send me emails. And I will say, a big thank you to, I don't know, it was like at least a couple dozen people reached out after the last episode and said, "Oh, really sorry to see you go, well, how can I follow you?" And gave me advice and said things like, "I'd really love if you'd make an email newsletter and, you know, send out your stuff." And I said, "Sounds like a lot of work-" "… I probably won't do that." And spoiler alert, it was and I didn't.

Mack:
But there are no shortage of places to find you. I will also say, we've been doing our audience survey, there'll be a link in the show notes if you haven't filled it out yet. We did get a number of nice comments for you as well, Troy. "I miss Troy on the podcast," or, "Mack and Stephanie are great, but they're just not spicy enough." That was a comment I heard a few times. So, you are loved in the Taproot community.

Troy:
Well, and, I think that leaves us with just one last thing to do on the podcast, which is for me to Steven Mandel the closing.

Mack:
It's like you've done this before.

Troy:
I have done this before, but I've always been number one for 300 episodes.

Mack:
Yeah.

Troy:
But, like, I don't think that's appropriate for a guest anymore.

Mack:
Okay. Well, until next week, I'm Mack.

Troy:
I'm Troy.

Mack:
And we're…

Both:
Speaking Municipally.