A candidate in the upcoming municipal election says he thinks his decades of covering and reporting in the community and covering council would be an asset if elected to Lethbridge City Council.
Al Beeber says after the past few years of covering council, he decided he could make a difference sitting on the other side of the bench and bring some new ideas to the table in a way that hasn’t been done before. Bieber says one of the biggest things he is hearing right now is people’s concern over the property taxes in the city and how high they are.
“I know council’s motivation for that 5.1 per cent increase over those last four years. You know, we didn’t raise taxes before that, so they had a lot of catching up to do. But that doesn’t change the fact that people are concerned about moving forward, because now we still have to pay,” Beeber says. “There are a lot of expenses coming up, and people are worried. Young families and seniors, how can they afford to do this? So I think we need to work with economic development efforts, you know, the experts that we have in City Hall, to try to increase our tax base.”
“By that I mean bringing more businesses, bringing more industry, attracting more residents to live here. That means promoting Lethbridge as a premium community, because we have so much to offer here. We really have to get the word out that Lethbridge is a place where professionals want to live here, where companies want to establish themselves to provide good jobs, to give jobs to the students coming out of university and college.”
Beeber says he is hearing from a lot of students, seniors, and transit workers themselves that our transit suite is not working. He explains one of the concerns is how the bus service ends so early at the University of Lethbridge, something he says needs to be worked on. Another transit concern is how disliked the downtown bike lanes are, with many downtown businesses having concerns.
“We’ve seen it’s affected traffic, how it’s affected businesses. I mean, it’s a pilot project right now, and as I’ve told people, I can walk quicker on a bike lane than I can on a sidewalk because nobody’s using them.”
“But is there a future for them in certain areas? You know, I’m open to ideas. But right now, the downtown one certainly doesn’t look that great. But I’d like to see what happens with this pilot project to see what results there are.”
When it comes to the finer details of understanding municipal politics, Beeber says that with his experience in the local media, he can help communicate which lane the city has to stay in and which lanes they can merge into, something he says needs to be made clear to the community.
“I know the city tries to tell people, but they need a person to actually do it on council. You know, when people say, well, you need to be doing more about this, you need to do more about that. Well, as a guy who’s been covering it for so many years, I can tell them, this is not in council’s purview,” Beeber says. “It’s something we can address through advocacy, and that there is. But I can also become an educator in that respect, too, while also governing and helping to get the message across.”
Beeber says if elected, he plans to keep the doors of communication open with the community because people need to know what is going on, and many of them are not attending council meetings.
