Envision Edmonton’s petition insufficient, City Centre Airport phased closure will continue

Yesterday the declaration of the City Clerk was released, stating that the petition put forward by Envision Edmonton was not sufficient, for two reasons:

  • There were no more than 73,657 valid signatures.
  • The petition was not brought within 60 days of Council’s decision to close the airport.

According to the Municipal Government Act (MGA) that means that City Council was not required to take any notice of the petition. They debated the issue in their final meeting before the election, and voted 10-3 against including a question on the ballot. The vote breakdown was exactly the same as it was in July 2009, when Council voted in favor of a phased closure of the City Centre Airport. Here are some of the quotes from the meeting:

  • “The decision to not put a question on the ballot is the right one for Edmonton.” – Mayor Mandel
  • “For some unknown reason it took 11 months to get a petition.” – Mayor Mandel
  • “This needs to end.” – Mayor Mandel
  • “This motion is the same year late as the petition. This needed to happen last year.” – Councillor Iveson
  • “I am not prepared to support something that could lead to 42 years of inefficient operation.” – Councillor Anderson
  • “Somebody has to have the guts to say enough is enough.” – Councillor Henderson
  • “I am prepared to stand up and say I did eight months of research on this issue.” – Councillor Krushell
  • “Is this the only big decision we’ve made in the last three years?” – Councillor Sohi

In both the meeting and a media briefing, we learned more about the petition verification process.

  • Roughly 80 staff worked for more than 3700 hours to verify the petition. About 60 of those staff were hired specifically for the verification process.
  • One of the first things the City had to do was photocopy every page of the petition. The copies and the originals are now stored in a vault, where they will remain for at least 5 years.
  • It turns out Envision Edmonton did not contact the City Clerk about its petition. If it had done so, it might have learned about the 60 day requirement.
  • Had the petition been valid and sufficient, the outcome of the question would have been binding for ten years. If Council had decided to put a question on the ballot anyway, its outcome would not have been binding.
  • The total cost for the verification is estimated at between $125,000 and $150,000.
  • Banister Research was hired to help complete the verification, which they did via telephone.
  • The petition signatories (addresses) were compared against both the Edmonton Elections database (current as of 2009) and SLIM (Spatial Land Inventory Management).
  • Since the July 2009 decision, the City has incurred costs of $12 million, while ERAA has incurred costs of more than $23 million.

Links

Lots of people have written about this already. Here are some relevant links:

Resources

PDF Municipal Government Act (2.4 MB)

PDF Declaration of the City Clerk (689 KB)

PDF Report on the Petition (55 KB)

Final Thoughts

I don’t for a second think the battle over the City Centre Airport is finished. I’m sure we’ll see additional challenges and fights in the weeks and months ahead. Edmonton Airports seems to think so as well, launching Share The Facts today. I am confident that City Council made the right decision yesterday however, and I think they’ll be rewarded for it on October 18.

Closing the City Centre Airport is the right decision for Edmonton’s future. Yesterday was simply another step along the way to making that future a reality.

Recap: Vacation in San Francisco

Sharon and I got back to Edmonton last night after spending ten days in San Francisco. I had never been there before but had always heard great things. As a bit of a “food town” we thought it would be a great place for us to go to get away from things for a while. Here are some of the highlights.

San Francisco
Based on a couple of recommendations, we looked at the Kimpton Hotel chain. We chose Hotel Triton, located right near the Chinatown gate. It was fantastic!

Heart of the City Farmers' Market
Pretty much the first thing we did after arriving was visit the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. It reminded us of our own City Market.

Chinatown
Chinatown was an early highlight for me. I’d never seen a Chinatown like the one in San Francisco!

Fisherman's Wharf
Without a doubt the most touristy place we visited was Fisherman’s Wharf. Lots to see and do in the area. I enjoyed eating fresh crab there!

Crooked Street
Another popular tourist spot is the crookedest street in America. No not Wall Street, Lombard Street.

Alcatraz
Of course, no trip to San Francisco would be complete without a trip to the infamous rock! We actually watched The Rock before leaving for our trip.

Coit Tower
This photo was taken from Coit Tower (you can see the reflection). If you can believe it, we ran into a couple we knew from Edmonton at the top of the tower! Small world.

Ferry Building
We loved all of the fresh produce that was available (and Sharon was particularly sad that we didn’t have a kitchen available). Visiting the Ferry Building Farmers’ Market was pretty cool.

Domaine Chandon
The tasting fees quickly added up, but our decision to take a tour of wine country turned out to be a good one.

Mack, Sharon, Hubert Keller
One of the dinners we had made reservations for in advance was at Fleur de Lys. The highlight was getting to meet Chef Hubert Keller, one of our favorites from Top Chef Masters.

Golden Gate Bridge
We decided to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. It started off foggy but quickly cleared. Other than being very windy, it was a great walk!

Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival
All the festivals we visited seemed to be extremely well attended, and the Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival was no exception. The lines were insane!

Opera in the Park

Opera in the Park
One of my favorite events was Opera in the Park. This year was San Francisco Opera’s 37th annual event.

San Francisco
This is me sitting in a POPOS – a privately owned public open space. I’m holding a Super Burrito from the San Buena Taco Truck, one of my favorite things we ate.

San Francisco
We did ride the cable car once. This photo also shows the hills San Francisco is known for, and a fire escape too (they were a very common sight).

Chez Panisse
Potentially my favorite dish – a pizza from Chez Panisse. I’m a sucker for eggs.

Muir Woods
On our last morning, we visited Muir Woods. It was so quiet!

Domaine Chandon
Sharon and I at the Domaine Chandon winery.

That’s really just a taste of our trip. You can see the rest of our photos (846 in all) here.

I really enjoyed San Francisco and would definitely visit again!

Notes for 9/6/2010

Here are my weekly notes, from San Francisco!

Microsoft on the Mac
I know I’m a big geek but this cracks me up.

Chinatown San Francisco
Chinatown in San Francisco.

Mack in front of the cable car
Me in front of the cable car on Powell Street.

Edmonton Notes for 9/4/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Edmonton’s bid for Expo 2017 was on display in Shanghai this week. Here’s the new video:

City Market
The City Market featured a petting zoo today!

Mayor Mandel
I’ve started noticing more and more signs and billboards around town for the election, like this one for Mayor Mandel who is hoping to win a third term.

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – July 2010

Welcome to the seventh State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For July 2010:

# of local users: 10501 (a decrease of 125 from June)
# of tweets by local users: 501941
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 22956 (4.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 153421 (30.6%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 148567 (29.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 21291 (4.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 16440 (3.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • Just over 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 11.3 tweets per minute in July (compared to 11.7 tweets per minute in June).
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was July 30 at 19863. On average, 16821 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 16821 in June).
  • Of the 153421 replies posted by local users this month, 47364 or 30.9% were to other local users.
  • A total of 1960 users posted 50 times or more in July. In comparison, 1587 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

  1. douglasi
  2. calgrasley
  3. izzynobre
  4. NatbyNature
  5. SteveMesler
  6. WestJet
  7. MarkIsMusing
  8. ahhhgolf
  9. StaceZimmerman
  10. PLRNetMarketing

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

  1. biancaquijano
  2. douglasi
  3. NatbyNature
  4. WestJet
  5. VeerUpdate
  6. NHLFlames
  7. izzynobre
  8. CarlaYoung
  9. accruing
  10. uppercasemag

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

  1. izzynobre
  2. buckshot_yyc
  3. PLRNetMarketing
  4. VaughanBuilders
  5. Kristinnuendo
  6. Victorrious
  7. calgaryplumbers
  8. CarlaYoung
  9. that_angela
  10. Missitalyxox

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyc (not including bots):

  1. lonnietaylor
  2. ThankASoldier
  3. Hughes4MayorYYC
  4. C_DIG
  5. Reactive_Candy
  6. harperonside
  7. nenshi
  8. petrodude73
  9. QR77football
  10. MsJodyM

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. that_angela
  2. Kristinnuendo
  3. dantric
  4. nicolesaxton
  5. danellew
  6. yogicrystal
  7. Acdngirl
  8. Darren_Krause
  9. lonnietaylor
  10. twowheelgeek

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

  1. calgaryherald
  2. calgarystampede
  3. cityofcalgary
  4. CBCCalgary
  5. ChinookCentre
  6. nenshi
  7. 660News
  8. YYCLostPet
  9. AvenueMagazine
  10. that_angela

Final Thoughts

A small decrease in users in July, maybe because everyone was outside doing things! No surprise that the Calgary Stampede was among the most retweeted for the month. Chinook Centre celebrated its 50th birthday on August 1, and made a big push for followers during the month of July which likely explains why it was retweeted so much. With the Calgary election heating up, it’s interesting to see that mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi was the 6th most retweeted user. I wonder if we’ll see more election-related stats as October 18 draws near.

Exploring Apps4Edmonton using Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

You’re going to hear a lot more about apps over the next few weeks! The deadline for submissions for the City of Edmonton’s Apps4Edmonton competition was Friday evening. Local developers came up with more than 30 really interesting and useful local apps, which will now compete for your votes and for the attention of the judges. You can learn more about the prizes and the competition here.

I started looking at some of the apps, and decided I wanted a better interface to browse them. I thought it would be nice to be able to sort the apps, to see a screenshot of each one, and to see which datasets each of the apps made use of. I also didn’t want to spend too much time on it, so with all of that in mind, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with Pivot.

Here’s what I came up with! Click on the image below to load the Apps4Edmonton Apps Directory in Pivot. You’ll need Silverlight 4 installed for it to work. Alternatively, if you have downloaded Pivot and have it installed on your computer, you can browse to this URL inside Pivot.

Click here to launch the Pivot!

Might take a minute or two to load. If it doesn’t, just refresh it. What you see are all the apps from the contest page, with a screenshot, description, contest URL, and list of datasets for each one. If you want to see just the apps that use the “Police Stations” dataset for example, you can select it in the navigation pane on the left and the view will update.

Ever since TechEd, I’ve been really interested in Microsoft Live Labs Pivot, an interactive data visualization technology. It’s great for exploring large datasets, identifying relationships, visualizing patterns, etc. The Apps4Edmonton dataset isn’t very large of course, but the tool still does a great job.

How It Works

I started out by building a Pivot Collection using Microsoft Excel. Pivot has a pretty handy tool for turning spreadsheets into collections, so that’s what I used initially. Quickly though I realized that I wanted to host this on the web somewhere, and that I wanted others to help me refine the dataset.

I uploaded the spreadsheet to Google Docs, and then downloaded the Just In Time Pivot Collection sample. After a little bit of experimentation with the Google Docs API (which I have never used before) I had the code working to create my collection on the fly. It loads the spreadsheet from Google Docs, creates the collection, and then serves up the XML and Deep Zoom images.

The spreadsheet is mostly complete, but a few apps are missing datasets. This is because either it wasn’t immediately obvious which they were using, or they simply don’t use any that are part of the data catalogue. You can update the spreadsheet here.

If you’d like to experiment with creating your own just-in-time Pivot Collection, you can download the sample code here and the code for the collection I wrote here. I also made use of CutyCapt to generate screenshots. You’ll also want to check the XML schema.

Apps4Edmonton

There are some really great apps in the Apps4Edmonton competition, so check them out. You’ve got until September 10 to vote for your favorite ideas and apps!

And for full disclosure, I submitted ShareEdmonton to the competition. If you like it, vote for it!

UPDATE: Thanks to John for helping me get the Pivot Collection right!

Notes for 8/29/2010

Here are my weekly notes:

Money Tree
I guess there is such a thing as a money tree! And it can be yours at Superstore for just $12.99!

Edmonton Notes for 8/28/2010

It’s the last weekend of August, and it certainly feels like it with the very cool wind. Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Downtown Edmonton
It was another wild week of weather here in Edmonton. Dark clouds!

City Market

Edmonton Opera had a “flashmob” at the City Market today.


Here’s a taste of the North Edge Outdoor Nite Market…from the hay ride!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – June 2010

Welcome to the sixth State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For June 2010:

# of local users: 10626 (an increase of 79 from May)
# of tweets by local users: 504633
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 22382 (4.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 156128 (30.9%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 148101 (29.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 22445 (4.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 17296 (3.4%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • Just under 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 11.7 tweets per minute in June (compared to 11.4 tweets per minute in May).
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was June 17 at 20079. On average, 16821 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 16355 in May).
  • Of the 156128 replies posted by local users this month, 49139 or 31.5% were to other local users.
  • A total of 1978 users posted 50 times or more in June. In comparison, 1600 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

  1. izzynobre
  2. VaughanBuilders
  3. dantric
  4. Victorrious
  5. nscafe
  6. ThisMasterpiece
  7. that_angela
  8. a_picazo
  9. PLRNetMarketing
  10. Kristinnuendo

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyc (not including bots):

  1. calgaryherald
  2. C_DIG
  3. CalgaryBeacon
  4. Hughes4MayorYYC
  5. petrodude73
  6. jillianwalker
  7. CalgaryBeacon2
  8. harperonside
  9. nscafe
  10. that_angela

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. Kristinnuendo
  2. dantric
  3. that_angela
  4. nscafe
  5. Diegirl
  6. yogicrystal
  7. C_DIG
  8. nicolesaxton
  9. Acdngirl
  10. danellew

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

  1. calgaryherald
  2. CTVCalgary
  3. cbccalgary
  4. YYCLostPet
  5. cityofcalgary
  6. Calgarystampede
  7. AvenueMagazine
  8. mikesbloggity
  9. CTVdavidspence
  10. that_angela

Final Thoughts

First off, my apologies to those of you who have been waiting for a stats update! I’ve been a little behind this summer.

There was a slight increase in the number of users in June, and a slight decrease in the number of tweets posted. I think that decrease is due to two things: one less day than in May, and the large amount of downtime that Twitter experienced in June (it was their worst month since August 2009).

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – July 2010

Welcome to the seventh State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For July 2010:

# of local users: 8227 (an increase of 49 from June)
# of tweets by local users: 446078
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 32290 (7.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 155793 (34.9%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 121874 (27.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 19864 (4.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 15646 (3.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates – UberTwitter and Twitter for iPhone continue to duke it out.

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • Just over 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 10.0 tweets per minute in July (compared to 9.8 tweets per minute in June).
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was July 30 at 19129. On average, 14390 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 14068 in June).
  • Of the 155793 replies posted by local users this month, 61444 or 39.4% were to other local users.
  • A total of 1658 users posted 50 times or more in July. In comparison, 1164 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

  1. revtrev
  2. Pat_Lorna
  3. randyfritz
  4. biofeed
  5. dancinginlife
  6. masseffect2
  7. dragonage
  8. subunit1
  9. NHL_Oilers
  10. MathieuBisson

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

  1. biofeed
  2. randyfritz
  3. revtrev
  4. masseffect2
  5. paradepro
  6. dragonage
  7. NHL_Oilers
  8. redneckmommy
  9. Pat_Lorna
  10. DaBaby

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

  1. rootnl2k
  2. Lekordable
  3. DWsBITCH
  4. donutsmile
  5. fraygulrock
  6. gcouros
  7. ummmwhatO_o
  8. frostedbetty
  9. SGT_ZamboniGuy
  10. angelzilla

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. ctvedmonton
  3. iNews880
  4. livingsanctuary
  5. DebraWard
  6. twitinbythepool
  7. joshclassen
  8. Sirthinks
  9. gjmventures
  10. cbcedmonton

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. ZoomJer
  2. angelzilla
  3. PoisonLolita
  4. frostedbetty
  5. britl
  6. joshclassen
  7. RockstarJodie
  8. bingofuel
  9. Wildsau
  10. LauraSem

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

  1. ctvedmonton
  2. edmontonjournal
  3. joshclassen
  4. mastermaq
  5. EnvisionEdm
  6. iNews880
  7. CityofEdmonton
  8. dantencer
  9. bingofuel
  10. TrafficEdmonton

Final Thoughts

Even though July is one of the busiest months of the year here in Edmonton, local Twitter users were still pretty active! Not many new accounts, but there was a noticeable jump in the number of updates posted. The busiest day of the month, July 30, was the last Friday of Capital EX and Taste of Edmonton, and was also the day the Eskimos snapped a four-game losing streak to win their first game of the regular season.