City of Edmonton puts up seasonal parking ban signs but City Council has yet to approve the move.

I take it as a sign of an already done deal (just how do they know it is a done deal is a good question though) as City of Edmonton workers are all over the place putting up Seasonal Parking ban signs throughout  Edmonton. But the matter does NOT come before City Council for discussion until theTransportation & Infrastructure Committee meeting September 6th at 9:30 am at City Hall where these reports will be debated.

Previous news stories here here and here ALL seem to suggest that the City was looking at this, and that NO decision was going to be made. Wrong.

So what happened?

According to someone I spoke to at City Hall they are claiming that the City Manager made the call under Bylaw 5590, which is the all encompassing traffic bylaw, but strangely enough 5590 makes NO mention at all of a seasonal parking ban.


So I ask: Who authorized these signs to be produced? Who gave the go ahead for them to be put up?  Can Council reverse this or are they powerless against the moves of Transportation and the City Manager? And lastly: why bother having council discuss this stuff at all if the City Manager can just do as he pleases without any concern as to what the citizens of Edmonton have to say?

Not that Transportation boss Bob Boutilier cares about what you think as he is already on record saying: "All I can say is, 'tough!' i got no other way of saying it. The situation we run into is, we got to keep the system operating." when citizen concerns over the seasonal parking ban were brought up.

BTW: Edmonton has had the Snow Route Bylaw since the 1970's which they did NOT even bother to use at all the last few years ( How do they know that it doesn't work if they didn't even bother trying it?) before some unelected civil servant ran off and passed enacted this new seasonal ban.