Municipalities must tackle crime and homelessness

By Al Beeber – Lethbridge Herald on April 27, 2024.

Herald photo by Al Beeber A meeting of mid-sized municipalities in Lethbridge on May 2 will discuss issues such as homelessness and other issues. The workshop is an initiative of the municipal government to gain support for best practices and to advance initiatives.

LETHBRIDGE HERALD[email protected]

Representatives from Alberta’s mid-sized municipalities will meet at city hall next week to discuss common problems on crime, homelessness and other issues.

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss the challenges facing communities in Alberta. The workshop, which is not open to the public, will be held at City Hall on May 2 from 4 to 7 p.m. and will also be streamed online for communities that were unable to attend in person.

It will be held the day before the unrelated Alberta Association of Police Governance Conference & Annual General Meeting, scheduled for May 3-4.

Councilman John Middleton-Hope, who came up with the idea for the workshop and was directed by Mayor Blaine Hyggen to engage other community leaders while he was deputy mayor, said Thursday morning after the Downtown Lawlessness Task Force meeting that it is beneficial to Municipalities meet to discuss common issues.

In British Columbia, 30 communities are currently working together on a similar approach, and other initiatives are underway across the country, the councilor said.

He said it is important that municipalities as a collective advocate for assistance to various provincial ministries.

Curtis Zablocki, deputy vice secretary for the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Services, will attend the workshop. Zablocki retired last year as deputy commissioner of the RCMP in Alberta.

Middleton-Hope said the minister wants councils to work together on projects that tackle crime and disorder problems in their communities.

“There is support from the government to do this, there is support from the municipalities,” he added.

The invited municipalities have more than 50,000 inhabitants. They include Grand Prairie, Wood Buffalo, Spruce Grove, Sherwood Park, Aidrie, Red Deer and Medicine Hat. The total population of these communities is approximately 700,000.

“This is council-driven, this is not police-driven, this is not police-commission-driven,” Middleton-Hope added.

“This is an initiative by the municipal government to get support for best practices, to get support for how we can move these initiatives forward,” he added.

“These are opportunities for other municipalities to learn from what we’ve done and we want to learn from them as well about what they’ve done, what works and what doesn’t work, so we don’t go down a rabbit hole.”

At the task force meeting, Middleton-Hope said other municipalities in western Canada are forming committees, task forces and working groups to analyze the problems they have in their urban cores.

In Alberta, 26 municipalities are medium-sized cities with a population between 15,000 and 110,000.

“The purpose of this was to understand the challenges that each of these communities face and how they compare to what we did in Lethbridge, both in terms of identifying the challenges we faced and identifying the challenges we faced. the potential solutions they may implement in other locations,” Middleton-Hope said.

At the Alberta Municipalities conference in Edmonton, conversations with mayors suggested there was “enough synergy” that they wanted to come together to have more discussions and have a chance to identify some of the challenging situations communities are facing, he added to.

The discussions will begin by providing other municipalities with insight into the Downtown Lawlessness Reduction Task Force and the city’s encampment strategy implemented last summer.

He said the hope is that other municipalities will provide insight into what they are doing to combat their own problems.

“Every community in the province, whether they are small, medium or large, experiences some form of addiction problems, homelessness problems and crime problems in the inner city to some degree,” he said.

“One of the things that we have clearly identified is that the resources that are being put into Calgary and Edmonton in particular have caused displacement, so we have seen a substantial increase in drug-related crimes for this specific reason, but not exclusively in this region . . Some of that has to do with the pressure on Calgary, and some of it has to do with our location. There are several reasons why that happens, but the reality is that we want to have these conversations with these other communities to tell them that they are not alone, that we are working on strategies to impact the issues in our neighborhoods and that we hear from them what kind of solutions they come up with,” Middleton-Hope added.

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