Speaking Municipally

You can now tap your credit card, debit card, or digital wallet to ride transit. Additionally, we'll discuss updates to the capital and operating budgets, and progress towards the city's tree-planting goal.

Here are the relevant links for this episode:

Extreme weather
Tap-to-pay
Traffic safety
Budget updates
Council budgets
Tree planting
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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.

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 Male:
Tapping on to transit and into trees. This week, you can finally tap your credit or debit card or digital wallet to ride ETS.

Stephanie Swensrude:
Plus, we'll talk about updates to the capital and operating budgets, as well as the city's tree-planting goal.

Mack:
Hi. I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack:
Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, Episode 336. We must be acclimatizing a little bit, Stephanie-

Stephanie:
(laughs).

Mack:
...' 'cause we both look a little less cold than the other day. But it's cold outside right now.

Stephanie:
Oh, it is. Yeah.

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
My car has just refused to start. I plug it in overnight. Maybe the, the, the plug is broken or something, and it always fails to start, so I have to, I get, I have one of those portable battery things. And I just carry that around with me wherever I go, because I know every time it turned off, it is not turning back on. If there are any car people listening to this pod- oh, what am I saying? (laughs) I was gonna say, "Come help me fix my car," but I don't think that's our demographic. (laughs)

Mack:
Wrong podcast. Oh, you never know.

Stephanie:
Yeah. (laughs)

Mack:
There might be.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Uh, it is really cold below minus-20 degrees Celsius and a lot of wind chill also, for at least three days in a row, which means the city has activated its extreme weather response. That's the criteria. They said this is activated actually through to December 19th, so you know-

Stephanie:
Wow.

Mack:
... if things change and it warms up, they could announce a change to that. During the weather response, there's a whole bunch of services and supports available. Uh, facilities like rec centers and libraries are available during regular operations for anyone needing a place to warm up. So it's Edmonton, it's December, it's going to get cold. There is some useful stuff though. We'll put the link in the show notes on the extreme weather response page if you want a little bit of a refresher on what the city does for people during this time. All right, the first thing we want to talk about, I'm very happy about this story. It's been a long time coming. We've talked about it on the show before. Edmonton Transit, and I guess everybody in the region who's part of ARC, has launched tap to pay. So you can now pay for transit using your physical credit card or debit card, or a digital one that you might have in Apple Pay, or Google Pay, or Samsung Pay, or something like that.

Stephanie:
Yeah, it's a, I think it's a, it's a huge deal. It's a huge step to be in line with a lot of the (laughs) rest of the world, because as people are very quick to point out, like this has been a thing in, at least in Vancouver when I lived there in 2019, it was a thing at least then. And it was so convenient, because you didn't have to worry about having a little card. Like, anyone with a credit card or debit card can just hop on the bus and use it, because like for me which may be shockingly, but a lot of my friends don't have an ARC card just because they, they don't use transit that much. So if it's ever like, "Oh, we wanna hop across the river to downtown," or something like that, "We should take the bus," they're, we have to look for change, and all this stuff. But now, they have no excuse. They have to ride the bus with me.

Mack:
Yeah. I used to carry those little tickets. Like when I didn't have a bus pass, I would carry the ETS tickets in my wallet so that if I ever needed to hop on a bus, I always had a paper ticket handy. Of course, now I have an ARC card, and I carry that all the time. You know, I never carry cash. I never carry actual money, really. And the thing that's so convenient for me about this new tap to pay is now I don't even have to carry the ARC card.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
Which, okay, sure. First world problem. It's a, it's a minor thing, but it's not just bringing us into alignment with other transit services elsewhere in the world who allow you to pay with credit cards. It's just our whole society is set up this way. Vending machines, you can now just tap your phone. If you want to donate to a charity, they have little tap things. Uh, if you wanna pay for groceries, you probably just tap your phone. Like all of these things, everywhere we go, every m- e- every time we need to spend y- money, we just tap. Now, you might not like that, because maybe that gives too much money to Visa or MasterCard, or whatever, but this is just the way the world works now. And it's really great that our transit now also aligns with this. So this is unquestionably a good thing. There are some quirks about the rollout, right, of this, and some new expectations for people. So one of them is like people like me who turned on auto-pay, or auto-reload I should say, on my ARC card, if I want to switch to the other thing now where I just tap my phone I've got to make sure I turn off the auto-reload. I discovered this the hard way the other day, because it just reloaded again. So I, you know, I wanna use up the ARC card balance before I switch to using my, my credit card or whatever. So that's one thing. Um, but a, you know, a bigger issue is what they call fare concessions, right Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah. So the fare concessions are for people who may be seniors, students, someone with the low-income ride pass. Um, so if, you can still get all of those like cheaper fares, but what you have to do is that you have to link that card, like your debit card or your digital wallet card, to your ARC account essentially. And if you go on the website, you should be able to just see how it is, how, how to do that. And then the other thing is that if you have a U-pass or a school board pass, you have to continue using the ARC card. And the, the news release said for the duration of the school term. Now, I'm not sure if that means until the end of 2026 school year, and then, and then that will be fixed, or if it's just all students are just gonna have to use the U-pass card. Um, I'm not, I'm not sure about that. So maybe that's something we can follow up with and find an answer for.

Mack:
I imagine they'll, they'll get that sorted and just have it be fully digital at some point.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Yeah. I was very curious about another aspect of this. So when you tap a physical credit card if you use the same card all the time, what it, the system will do is still honor fare caps, right? So if you've spent a certain amount in the month, it's not gonna charge you more. It's gonna know that you've hit the, the cap, right? So that's a really positive thing. This means you have to use the same card all the time though. You can't-... you know, have two different credit cards and use them and expect to get the same fare cap hit. Like, it's gonna be individual for each card. And this is also important for digital, right? 'Cause if you have a physical card and then you have a, um that card added to, say, your Google Pay, Google Wallet, those are actually different things in the eyes of the sort of network, right? Because when you tap your phone to pay, it doesn't actually give the vendor your credit card number. It gives them this other card number that changes, and this is one of the reasons that, you know, people like me, I, I like to use the Google Pay thing quite a bit 'cause it's a little- it feels a bit more secure, right? I don't have my actual card number going out to all these places. And I was curious to know if that meant that Apple Pay or Google Pay would actually work with this system, because you do get this random different number all the time. So you looked into that for me, Stephanie, which is awesome. What did you find out?

Stephanie:
Yeah. So I reached out to the city and the spokesperson said that the digital credit card numbers that you use in your digital wallet, they can change frequently to provide extra security by masking the card's details. But the transaction with the ARC machines will use the true card identifier and not the masked identifier to settle payment. So this means that your form of payment will be associated with the fare cap. Um, and they did a bunch of testing in the last couple of months and it confirmed that digital wallet users are able to reach their fare caps, but again, the digital version of a card and the physical version are different, so you wanna use the same one if you want, if you wanna hit the fare cap.

Mack:
Right, if you don't wanna get charged more than what you should, if you've taken transit a lot. Okay, so that's awesome. I'm glad to hear that. Uh, I, we knew people were testing this system, right? Uh, it was just this week, though, that we noticed the or I noticed, I've been back to taking the bus every day that the little icons showed up on the, the ARC scanners on the buses and things like that. So great to see this now in place. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Stephanie, which is now, this is such a unnecessary thing, but I only carry one card, and that is my driver's license. All my credit cards, or the ones that I want to use, are in my Google Pay. The province this year launched the Alberta Wallet, which means my healthcare card is now a digital version in my phone. You know, I have a digital lock, I can unlock it with my phone. Uh, now I can just tap my phone to pay for transit. The only thing I need to physically carry is a driver's license. I wish instead of putting citizenship on driver's license cards, we could have just made those digital. And the province said they will add more stuff to this Alberta Wallet in the future, but we don't know if the driver's license will be one of them. So for now, it's the last thing I have to carry.

Stephanie:
Well, I have a few thoughts about that. First of all, I don't carry an Alberta healthcare card, but that's just because I've memorized my number somehow. So when people ... I go to the doctor and they ask for the card, I say, "I don't have the card, but my number is da-da-da-da-da."

Mack:
(laughs) Nice.

Stephanie:
So I don't know, that's just a weird thing (laughs) about me. Uh, maybe I'll start memorizing my, all my Visa car- my Visa numbers and stuff too. But Mack, what do you do if your phone dies? Or I guess you just don't let it die.

Mack:
Oh, it just never dies. It's being charged all the time.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. (laughs)

Stephanie:
Okay. Couldn't be me, I have too high of a screen time. Um, I was gonna say one last thing about this, is that I'm, I was wondering, am I gonna still use the ARC card or am I gonna use the credit card? Uh, because I have like a little wallet on the back of my phone that I keep my ARC card, my, uh-

Mack:
Yeah, me too. I have the same thing.

Stephanie:
... license and and uh, my credit card in. But I'm thinking, I was like, oh, am I gonna still use the ARC card? And I remembered, no, I'm not, because every time I have to refill my ARC card, for some reason it takes me, like, 20 minutes because you, if you haven't logged on in 90 days, you have to change your password. And then actually, oh, I don't even wanna, I'm gonna get mad if I keep talking about this, but let's just say I will be glad to be rid of the ARC ... It's not even an app. That's the thing, it's like they don't even have an app for it. Ugh, okay, sorry.

Mack:
It's just a website. Yeah.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
I mean, this is, this is why I turned on the auto-reload feature on my ARC card, because I ran into the same problem. And, you know, never mind that this goes against current established best practice for security, which is that you don't force passwords to expire, because then people create really bad passwords every 90 days and they're easier to break into. That website, you can now avoid all of that stress and just tap your credit card.

Stephanie:
And I will be. I w- I wonder if now you'll be able to ... Here's the, here's our faux rapid fire joke. Now you can earn PC Optimum Mastercard points on the, on, on ETS.

Mack:
That's probably true, actually.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
That's interesting. Okay, yeah.

Stephanie:
Ooh, okay, okay. (laughs)

Mack:
All right, well, moving on from transit to traffic safety. We talked recently about some of the decisions that council has made around traffic safety and this new team they want to create. And you spotted an op-ed that I think had some pretty interesting things to say about this idea. So what did you find?

Stephanie:
Yeah, so it was an interesting name because it was from Louis Hugo Francescutti, which Mack, I believe is a doctor who often talks about homelessness and the opioid crisis, those sort of things. So is it-

Mack:
Yeah, he's an emergency room physician. He's w- very experienced in this space. Yeah.

Stephanie:
It then, immediately it made sense because this is really like a public safety thing. But he said that you know, the traffic safety squad might actually end up making things worse. So we'll provide a little counterpoint to what we've been talking about for the last few weeks. He said that basically making traffic safety not the responsibility of the police will actually make it less likely to be taken seriously by the rest of Edmonton. So he said, "Deterrence theory has shown that behavior changes when the certainty of being caught goes up, not just the severity of the penalty." So a traffic squad that just conducts periodic blitzes can't replace routine, visible enforcement by every officer on the road. So what we need is consistent enforcement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Mack:
... kind of like, you know, cameras that might be out there to catch people speeding, let's say?

Stephanie:
No, but that would be a cash cow, Mack. Duh.

Mack:
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Stephanie:
(laughs) He named this interesting case from Peoria, Illinois. He said it's a powerful example of what happens when police treat traffic enforcement as core police work. So I guess in the mid-'90s, a new superintendent made traffic a priority, so they did more vehicle stops, more citations, sobriety checkpoints, and they coordinated with state police. Um, so when they compared the two-year period from 1994 to the previous two-year period, traffic citations rose 24%, officer-initiated activity rose by 28%, and DUI arrests rose by 11%. At the same time, crashes fell by 21%, calls for service dropped by 6%, violent crime dropped 10%, property crime dropped 12%. So he says, "When officers took traffic seriously, both roads and neighborhoods became safer." Yeah, so I thought that was interesting.

Mack:
Yeah, I mean, it's always hard when you read things like this to, you know, pick apart all those numbers.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
There's lots of factors probably that go into, you know, any change and it, you know, this is looking at statistics, but it, there's not a, there's not a direct causation necessarily here. There's a correlation. So that's always interesting to dig into, but it is a good example, and it kinda makes sense, right, that if you wanna change something, you should measure it, and you should put attention into it. And this is one way of doing that, is I think what he's arguing, which is if you get the police, who in theory are out and about and visible and present, to be more proactive in doing these things, that can change behavior quite a bit. So that's, that's one counterpoint to what we've been talking about. We know there's lots of examples, though, of asking the police to do more of something leading to bad outcomes, and I'm thinking of carding and things like that. Uh, maybe that's less of a concern with vehicles, but there's still potentially some unintended consequences, I think, that, that might come to mind from something like this.

Stephanie:
Yeah, for sure.

Mack:
But it's an interesting counterpoint for sure, and, you know, these periodic blitzes or, or, you know, if it is a periodic blitz, that's still an improvement over what I suspect is gonna happen a lot, which is just education campaigns and things like that. Uh, any other recommendations in the op-ed about what we might do?

Stephanie:
So he ended the article with saying something pretty striking, I would say. He said, "Chiefs must measure and report traffic enforcement with the same seriousness as homicide clearance rates."

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
Like, treat it as seriously as homicide, which I thought was interesting. Uh, "Politicians must fund the staffing required for true 24/7/365 coverage, and the public must hold law enforcement accountable when speeding, impaired driving, and red light running are visibly rampant."

Mack:
Yeah, I mean, I think treating it like homicide actually makes a lot of sense when that can actually be what happens in, in a lot of cases. Uh, we've done extensive reporting about this before at, at Taproot, and, and the idea that a vehicle is a weapon, and you have a higher responsibility when you're driving the 2,500-pound vehicle than the person on the road walking. Um, we need to, we need to treat those things more like how we treat other types of homicide. We somehow treat vehicular deaths differently than other kinds of deaths, and that doesn't seem right.

Stephanie:
I mean, it even has, I kinda noticed a stutter there where you said veh- almost said vehicular manslaughter because-

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
... that's kind of like the common term for it, yeah.

Mack:
Right. So I think that message of taking it seriously makes a lot of sense to me. I suppose we should point out though that just because we're creating this new traffic safety team doesn't necessarily mean we're saying to police, "Don't go and do any of this enforcement." Like, it's possible to have both things, right? And maybe the implication of having this separate team is that the police can say, "Oh, that's handled. We don't have to do that now." But that's certainly not my understanding of the intent behind the creation of this team.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I, I would hope that police don't just (laughs) see a car speeding by at 100 and they just go, "Oh, the bylaw will get that." (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. (laughs) Uh, all right, well, it needs to be funded, and we need money to fund things like this, so let's talk about funding. You, we, we got an economic update this week. We heard last week a bit of a preview of this, 'cause the agenda's real. We know that there's a bit of a surplus being projected for 2025, but council also heard more about the economy and how things are doing in Edmonton. So Stephanie, you were paying attention to this. What did you hear?

Stephanie:
Yeah, this kind of report is always so interesting. It comes out every quarter, and I find just it's more of a zoomed-in view of w- h- where we are when it comes to the economy, population growth, and housing starts, which, three of my favorite topics.

Mack:
(laughs) I'm sure.

Stephanie:
Okay. So the chief corporate economist, Felicia Multheardy, wrote that, "Consumer inflation in the Edmonton region fell to 1.4% in Q3 2025," which is its slowest pace for growth since the beginning of 2021. So I feel like in 2022, that was when like the big inflation period really started, and now it seems like we've gone back down to like er, like, mid-COVID times, which I think is a good thing. (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah, I mean, in the, in the note it says that this deflation in core utilities and a decline in transportation prices, mainly because of the removal of the federal consumer carbon tax, you know, alleviating-

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
... some of the pricing on, on fuel and things like that were contributors to this. So that kinda makes sense, right? Um, and, and we've heard at a macro level from the Bank of Canada that, you know, inflation is, is not terrible, right? It's across the board in Canada kind of close to their target range or kind of where they'd like, like it to be. So slowing for Edmonton is good for us. It means lower prices in theory, although I don't know if you went out and talked to the average Edmontonian that they would say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I've noticed the effects of lower inflation." (laughs)

Stephanie:
... no. Well, that's what tough about this is that it kind of, I feel like it takes a while for things to, like, trickle down from reports like this to actually people's pocketbooks. But something interesting in, that I wanted to point out was another thing that contributed to slowing consumer inflation was an easing in shelter prices. So, the report says, "The interaction from continued expansions to housing supply with slower population growth likely contributed to this easing in shelter price." So the report says that the inflation rate for rented accommodation was 1.9%, which is the lowest rate since the beginning of 2023, and the inflation rate for owned accommodation has slowed to 2.6%, the lowest pace since the beginning of 2022.

Mack:
Okay, so this is interesting. So what they're basically saying here is we've built more houses, or construction activity has gone up from where it used to be, and population growth has slowed a little bit from where it used to be. And so, this is causing the inflation of rents and, and house prices to rise sl- more slowly than it had in the past, or than we expected it to. I think that's really interesting because w- we've heard a lot over the course of this year about housing, and about how Edmonton has this relative housing affordability advantage, but we're gonna lose that if we don't keep pace. If we don't continue to build more homes, then the prices are gonna go up and we're not gonna have this advantage that is bringing a lot of people to Edmonton. And we've heard that we've added, you know, a red deer every year for the last couple of years, or you know, hundreds of thousands of people have moved to Edmonton recently. Uh, so the this population growth slowing maybe doesn't track with what we hear in the, in the news, but it is just a, a minor decline, I think, in recent years over where we were, you know, a year ago, or, or in the last two years. But it's still growing. It's still growing really rapidly, just a little bit slower than it was previously for us. So, that, I think, hopefully provides a little bit of context around those two numbers.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm. So in the meeting, Councillor Ann Stevenson asked Ms. Yardi to confirm, kind of say straight up, "Okay, so with the increased construction and slowing population growth, that has helped us maintain our relative affordability?" And she said yes, so that's, that's good, I guess. (laughs)

Mack:
That's good, yeah. I just I'll put this in the show notes, but we found this chart from the provi- the provincial government about housing starts for for Edmonton, and it goes back to, you know, 1972 is how, how far back you can go and you can look. And 2024 was a record year, right? There was more housing starts in 2024 than in any year recorded. Pretty close behind was 19... What is this, 1978 there was a lot of housing starts. So this increase in the last few years, you know, follows quite a big decline after 2015, right, when we had the last downturn, or it really start in this province. So, you know, housing starts are kind of back up to where they were a decade ago, I guess is the way to put it. And if we can keep going with that, then maybe we can continue to have a little bit of this housing affordability advantage continue.

Stephanie:
Yeah. The economist did say that the housing starts will start to wind down in 2026.

Mack:
Ah.

Stephanie:
Councillor Keren Tang said, basically said, "How much should we be worried?" And they didn't, they, I wouldn't, I won't say they dodged that question but it is so hard with forecasts because like-

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
... you really don't know. I also feel like they've been saying for years that population and housing starts are g- are not going to grow as fast the next year, and then they go even faster. I feel like that's been what's happened in the last few years. But for some more numbers around building permits, so this isn't really the same as housing starts, but the value of residential and non-residential building permits together was $1.3 billion in Q3, so that's a 19% increase over Q3 2024. So looking specifically at residential the residential building permits issued in Q3 were valued at $808 million, which is a 15% gain over Q3 2024. Uh, with those building permits issued in Q3, it signaled increased building intentions for row housing and apartments relative to last Q3.

Mack:
Interesting, so more multifamily housing. And as you point out, the slowdown isn't gonna be visible in the 2025 numbers. It looks like it's gonna go up quite a bit over the 2024 numbers, so interesting to see that. Uh, did they say anything about the multifamily housing aspect of this?

Stephanie:
Other than that, not really, no.

Mack:
Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting. Uh, as we know, in city plan, we have this plan, this goal, to to change the way we grow, and to, you know, to put it in a different way, kind of grow up a little bit more than we grow out, and that in- that includes more dense housing options. So that's kind of interesting to see that there's a bit of data to support that.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm. I remember around June the city put out a big report on the first year of the zoning bylaw, but that year had been like a year and a half. Or by that time it had been about a year and a half, but yeah. Obviously, more infill and higher density central developments were built, but at the time, the overall growth pattern for Edmonton was still overwhelmingly suburban, outside of the Henday. So, I think that just because we've been building out, like, so much, and that's kind of, like, the culture of Edmonton in a way, I think that it'll take a long time for that to get reined in.

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
But the thing is with this information about there's increased building intentions for row housing and apartments, there are a lot of row housing and apartments going up in new developments on the outskirts of the city.

Mack:
Yeah, that's right. If you drive around, you know, the Henday, around the outside, you see a lot of apartment buildings, more than you might expect, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
You might expect to go out really far and all you're gonna see is single family homes, but that's not the case, right?

Stephanie:
Not at all.

Mack:
There's quite a bit of multifamily housing in all of those areas.Well, bringing this back to council that $15.7 million surplus we talked about previously, that's basically going to go to help with our financial stabilization reserve. But the other budget item that we got an update on is the capital budget. We are into the last year of our four-year capital budget, same as the operating budget. Uh, so what's the update there, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah. So out of the 85 projects that are in the 2023-2026 capital budget 80 are in the acceptable tolerance for budget and 78 are within the acceptable tolerance for schedule. I then I went through and looked at kind of what were the biggest delays or the biggest budget overruns, so I'll run through some of those there.

Mack:
Sure.

Stephanie:
For delays the city is 61% behind on its work to rehabilitate the Ironworks building and the reason for that is that they deferred the opening to align with the building's community activation objectives. That's kind of vague, but I think that they just said, "Oh, well it's not going to be used for X amount of time, might as well take that amount of time to rehabilitate." But yeah, the Imagine Jasper Av project, it was 28% behind schedule because they changed up the design, which resulted in actually both a higher cost and delayed project scheduling, and they're 120% behind on the Downtown District Energy project because that project has increased in scope.

Mack:
So not- not bad overall that 78 are within the acceptable tolerance for schedule. I mean, the day-to-day impact, you're driving down Jasper Avenue or you're driving down 104th Avenue, or any of these other places around the city, you do see that construction still visible and so it's on schedule, but it's still painful. What about what about budget? You said 80 of the 85 are on budget, or within the tolerance.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Any- any noticeable ones that were pretty big over budget?

Stephanie:
I'll just mention one here because it's so vague, but I want to know more, but I highly doubt that I will ever know more. The Heritage Valley Land Development project is 59% over budget and the reasoning they gave is there has been unexpected cost and schedule impacts due to a non-participating landowner and obtaining agreements for crossing the pipeline right of way. So if someone doesn't want to give up their land for the (laughs) Heritage Valley Land Redevelopment project.

Mack:
Or thinks that they might be able to get a little bit of compensation for it.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Or- Or something along those lines, yeah.

Stephanie:
Yeah. Um, maybe also we can, here we can talk a bit about the Valley Line West LRT. This isn't really included in this, but they recently reopened 104 Ave both directions after that accelerated construction project.

Mack:
Yeah, I got the news release about that. I've not actually driven down there myself since they did that but they said they're back up to two lanes, right, in each direction. It had been down to one lane and pretty tight, actually, to get through there, all the way from 105th Street, just past the arena, all the way west to about 121st Street.

Stephanie:
Yeah, my best friend lives right there and had to cross that for work and just e- every, she- she was like, "Every day it feels like a completely different configuration and I'm so scared all the time." Um, and yeah, th- this accelerated construction timeline, they basically decided shorter t- shorter-term pain for long-term gain rather than medium-term pain for long-term gain, so they decided to have kind of more annoying closures, but for a much shorter amount of time. And there were some of these closures, it went from like two, like 48 weeks of construction season closures down to like six weeks. It was crazy, and again, we talked about this within the last few weeks, like, why don't they do this with every- with every project?

Mack:
Well, hopefully the more experience we get under our belts with that, the more likely it is that they'll pick that up in the future.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
All right, well, we're talking about council. I feel like it's late in the season to be talking about council to some degree. Like it's December 11th and December 12th when you're listening to this, and they're still meeting. There's still a whole week of meetings to go, actually. There's a public hearing in council next week which I- I don't know, I haven't checked on this, but it feels later to me than in past years.

Stephanie:
I wonder if it's because it's an election year and- and like they want to get some stuff out of the way before Christmas for like the new council members. I have no idea.

Mack:
It could be, yeah. I haven't I don't remember four years ago. That's likely.

Stephanie:
(laughs) I barely remember last month. (laughs)

Mack:
And one of the meetings I wanted to mention is Council Services Committee, so they're meeting on Friday as you're listening to this, and this is a pretty standard meeting at this time of year. Council Services is the one that deals with things like furniture requests and the budget of the Office of City Councillors. And so there's a usual number of requests here. It's just over $11,000 in requests for furniture. Most of them are storage or sit-stand desks or something like that. There were six offices, I guess, that did not have modern sit-stand desks and so I always like to look at these things, I'm just curious to find, you know, what are councils- councillors looking to do, what kind of improvements are being made because every- every year essentially there's some- some sort of improvement. There's quite a bit of a range in sit-stand desks from $500 for Odaeman to more than $1,750 in Papastew, Pahastewin, and Epikokitipohsi. So I feel like there should be a standard sit- stand desk, Stephanie? But I don't know. Somehow Councillor Stevenson has found a cheaper option.

Stephanie:
Yeah. I don't know.

Mack:
And then a little bit of new furniture in Keren Tang's office but you know, nothing major, no big surprises, but I did have to laugh at Nakoda-Isga Reid Clark's office. They are requesting a 50-inch television.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Yep.

Mack:
I'm sure these are-... totally valid request.

Stephanie:
Legitimate. (laughs)

Mack:
They use them for other things, screen sharing, whatever. But it ... And I promise you, Councillor Clark will stop making sports jokes at some point.

Stephanie:
Eventually. (laughs)

Mack:
But it just, it just felt like, of course, the sports guy's gonna request the 50-inch TV, you know? (laughs)

Stephanie:
What I like to think is that they had a 50-inch TV before but they were, like, tossing a football back and forth in the office and it ricocheted and it destroyed the TV. And he's like, "Oh no, I need new TV." That's, that's what happened, I think. (laughs)

Mack:
That could be it. That could be it, yeah. (laughs) Uh, in addition to furniture, the other thing that council services will look at is travel. I don't think there's any major surprises here. Councillors who sit on things like FCM, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, or other organizations, they've got to travel for meetings and things like that. But there are two requests to go to the Calgary Stampede. Uh, Councillors Elliott and Tang have requested funding to go to the Stampede in 2026. We've talked to people about this before. Politicians always make the case that you gotta be there and it can be very efficient 'cause all the other politicians are there, and a conversation you have at Stampede can just help move things along. But I always find it interesting.

Stephanie:
It is one of the most Alberta things that can possibly exist, is that there's no chance in getting, you know, funding from the province unless (laughs) you put on a cowboy hat and eat pancakes at the Stampede.

Mack:
Yeah. Well, someone's gotta do it. This year, I guess it's Councillors Elliott and Tang, so thank you. (smacks lips)

Stephanie:
Yeah. And also, I guess one thing we should say is that Andrew Knack will likely go, I'm assuming, but all of these requests are just for the councillors. The mayor gets his own kind of, uh-

Mack:
Separate budget.

Stephanie:
... separate budget, yeah.

Mack:
Yeah, yeah, good point. All right, we have one other thing we wanted to talk about this week. Taproot Bit did a bit of reporting about this, and then the city followed up with a news release.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
We're talking about trees. So Edmonton has this goal to plant two million trees. And originally, in City Plan, this was to plant two million by 2050. Like a long time from now. And then they really condensed that and said, "We're gonna plant two million trees by 2030," which is incredible. Now they're saying they're basically on track, it might be 2031. So what was the update we got this y- this week, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah, so the city told us that they have planted 810,546 ... Not 45, not 47, 46 net new trees and shrubs since 2021. And in 2025 alone, they planted more than half of those. So in 2025, they planted 484,091 trees.

Mack:
Yeah, the previous record was last year, right? 2024. I think it was about 342,000 or so, so that's quite an increase in one year. Maybe it'll keep going up. Who knows? Uh, but we're on, we're on looking pretty good here in terms of uh, the goal to get to 2031. And the sooner we plant those trees, the better, because they can grow up big and be beautiful and, and contribute positively to the city in the future. And, you know, the, the city talks about some of the benefits. It's, it's of course, enjoyment and shade but also there's impacts on water and, and other climate effects as well, of having all of these trees. So I think that's fantastic. Maybe we'll even see in this council term some movement on the private tree bylaw.

Stephanie:
Oh, yes.

Mack:
You know, protecting trees on private property, that could be pretty interesting. Uh, the city is confirming that they're expecting still to get the money from the federal government's 2 Billion Trees Program. So that's about $48 million. And then the city itself has approved another $66 million to fund the, the planting of all of these trees. Lots of it happens with volunteers as well. There's the Root for Trees program and other things. But pretty encouraging to see so much progress on, on trees. And, you know, we lose some trees every year too, because of disease or age or other things. But pretty awesome that we've planted so many trees. And you, you, you pointed out that they have this specific number, right? Like 810,546. Like, they're very specific. And I love that because trees are one of those interesting things. You can go into the city's open data catalog and you can see the catalog of, of public trees. Um, there's other cities that have these data sets too. It's really kind of interesting that you have these real, physical, natural things out in our, in our community, and then you can see this digital representation of them as well. So I love that.

Stephanie:
Yeah. I'll, I'll say one more thing about this, is that I think it was last year that the Dutch elm disease touched down in Edmonton. And it does ... That was scary because it really can, like, wipe out so many, so many streets because we have so many elms in Edmonton. And we talked to Dustin Bajor, who is a ... He runs the ShrubScriver community for people interested in, like, growing urban trees. He's, like, a, a big tree guy. He's really cool. It's, it's always a fun time when I get to talk to him. And he said every elm that we plant puts us in a liability, and that he loves elms but he thinks in order to protect the ones that we do have, we should stop adding elm to our inventory. So although elms are gorgeous, maybe we gotta start planting some other ones. I don't know. I ... Oaks? I don't know what tree names are. (laughs)

Mack:
(laughs) Some, some less disease-prone species, I suppose, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
The city says we lose, what, 3,000 to 4,000 per year because of age and disease and things like that. So presumably most of the new ones they're planting are species they've identified as as ones we want to be planting for the long term.

Stephanie:
Hopefully.

Mack:
All right. Well, we got one week of council to go, like I said, Stephanie. I look forward to hearing what you find out next week as they wrap up and head into a winter break. We've got one more episode of Speaking Municipally to go before we're onto a little bit of a break, and we'll be back in, in early 2026. Uh, but you can find that episode next week as usual, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're there, leave us a review. That would be great. And until next week, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.