Troy Pavlek

@troypavlek.ca

I'm the TMZ of Edmonton City Council

The UCP might make Edmonton pay up to $170M to rip out its own bike lanes. I've heard reports that the UCP has been asking for costs of full network removals. City numbers put that at $150-170M This is the same gov't that just spent $130M on a glorified opinion poll.

This will be Danielle Smith's cheat-to-win election. The far right separatists she courted are turning on her. Smith will do anything to not end up discarded like every other conservative premier. That includes cheating. Her gerrymandered maps will be tabled by Nov 2.

Hazeldean Bakery is reopening! The home of Edmonton's best apple fritters will have its grand reopening tomorrow, October 20th, after the previous owner, Lucy retired and sold last December. Everything will be free for the day! Get your fritter.

Edmonton City Council is being forced to break the law. Danielle Smith wants a public hearing, and she also wants to dictate how council votes at that hearing. But council must enter public hearings with an open mind. Once again, the UCP just has not thought anything through

"Who cares about an election? No one does." That's what an organizer behind Edmonton's anti-infill push believes. No wonder they pushed the Premier to throw out local democracy. Despite what Jesse Watson thinks, mandates come from elections, not his preferences.

Sources tell me Danielle Smith will force Edmonton to repeal its zoning bylaw. Smith's UCP loyalist friends in Edmonton Neighbourhoods United, whose agenda lost in the last election, asked for her help, just like she helped the separatists. Local democracy is dead.

Radon is Canada's leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. Almost every Edmonton house has some of it. My house has been trying to kill me for years. But I won, and my radon is mitigated. Test for radon, folks. You can borrow radon testers from EPL. pls dont die

Went to a concert in downtown Edmonton tonight. Drove there. No traffic. Parked directly outside the front door. Cost $2.62 Transit would have taken 2.5x the time, with 10x the walking and would cost $12. We apply user fees to public options, and subsidize private ones. And we reap what we sow.

The police commission has banned public speakers. What can we do about it? Real legal avenues are limited, because council can't interfere and the UCP is unlikely to oppose the police. The best lever is to make it politically unpalatable to continue as they are, and force them to back down

The public has been banned from police commission meetings. EPS costs over half a billion dollars every year, and the commission is supposed to keep them accountable. Instead of answering questions about the chief flying to Israel, they've decided the public is the problem.

FOUR NEW CASES. Half of all Dutch Elm cases in Edmonton since 2024 have been in the past 3 weeks. More proactive elm removal will be required to prevent it. And I'm hearing up to 40 trees along Whyte Ave may be proactively removed this summer.

Storms in #yeg have damaged Elms and left their branches in piles. Absolutely perfect conditions for spreading Dutch Elm disease. Meanwhile, the 10th case of DED has been discovered in the Calder neighbourhood. If it's not contained now, we may not be able to contain it - ever.

Torrential rain, choking smoke. Edmonton is currently suffering the negative outcomes of climate change. Instead of tackling this head on, the UCP is blocking renewables, doubling down on oil & gas and meddling in the curriculum indoctrinating kids to worship the cult of Oil.

Spend more, get nothing: the UCP's healthcare strategy. Hundreds of millions wasted scrapping the Edmonton hospital and superlab, blowing up AHS, privatizing then buying back lab services and importing Turkish Tylenol. And we’re left with absolutely nothing to show for it.

UCP minister Devin Dreeshen's resume includes: - campaigning for Trump - drinking on the job - mocking worker safety, before workers died - refusing to oppose separatism This is the top-notch guy Danielle Smith handpicked to ban bike lanes in Alberta

Karen Principe stopped a discussion about permitting balcony solar panels, insisting they remove references to Europe and Utah for being "colonial". She's also defended the police chief's trip to Israel, where he visited illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Make it make sense.

We have details of just how bad a deal the privatization scheme Stephen Harper forced on Edmonton is. The private contractor is charging us so much that in just two years of running the Valley Line ourselves we can pay the entire 30-year termination fee. The waste is absurd.

Once again, privatizing public services has failed. Edmonton is taking back control of the Valley Line LRT from the private consortium with a 30-year operation contract. Privatization was forced on the city by Harper. Now, nature is healing🤗

If you're paying for parking, the city thinks you're a sucker. More population, more parking zones, more hours and yet fines and enforcement have PLUMMETED in the past decade. We don't need new parking rules. We need to enforce the ones on the books already.

Edmonton is consistently doing REALLY cool stuff behind the scenes. The new EPCOR smart grid tech they're trialing is going to enable so many more cool applications, like vehicle electrification at way mor efficient and economical startup costs. Just so cool.

No, making DST permanent is probably not anti-democratic. The referendum failed by a slim 0.2% margin, but consultations by both NDP and UCP show this is what the MOST Albertans wanted. No consultation or vote shows a preference for standard time.

You're going to hear people talking about experts saying DST hurts circadian rhythm. However, more evening daylight encourages activity, the single best thing we can do to improve public health. Traffic fatalities, especially vs pedestrians are reduced with more evening daylight.

Alberta is moving to permanent daylight time. No more changing the clocks. Long summer evenings. Bits of sun after work in winter. Lloydminster will finally be one time zone. Announced via Rick "Every Paragraph is One Sentence" Bell.

If you perform yard cleanup this (gorgeous) weekend, you're committing pollinator-cide. It's not time yet. The bugs and bees are still sleeping. Leave your leaves and delay yard cleanup until it warms up consistently. Don't kill the bees.

When Andrew Knack won, he was outspent six-to-one. Like a bad birthday magician, Tim Cartmell revealed how his trick was going to work. He made it obvious he wanted to buy the election, and so every additional dollar spent made people less likely to vote for him. $1.5M, gone.