First up, thought I’d point out that the city wants to let Regina’s dog lovers know that they’re looking for people to participate in the Off-Leash Dog Park Stewardship Group. The group helps to enhance and maintain the city’s off-leash dog parks. How? No idea. But you can find out on the city’s website and at a meeting on Thursday, March 3, from 7 to 8:30 pm at city hall.

You know, TWACH fans, we’ve so far failed at taking over the Planning Commission but now’s our chance to totally stack the Off-Leash Dog Park Stewardship Group with prairie dog readers and start to implement some of our nefarious, lefty schemes. So get out there and sign yourselves up.

Second, curious about the lack of TWACH updates lately? Well, I’m going to explain anyway. The last couple weeks there hasn’t been a lot going on at city hall. Well, unless you count that summit thing, and that sprawl thing, and that firing of the Planning Director thing. Okay, so maybe city hall has been busy. But as for official meetings over the past fortnight there have only been a few advisory committee meetings and they seem to have mainly been doing that start-of-the-year going over of work plans and looking at annual reports. So I didn’t write them up and instead focused my attention on a deep investigative piece on the surprise delisting of Bartender Secrets Whiskey Sour pre-mixed cocktail. A story, I might add, that was totally ignored by all the other media outlets in the province.

See, prairie dog only covers the news that matters.

Third… well, third is the usual rundown of what’s happening downtown. And it starts with….

Tuesday, February 15
PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE (4 pm): Receiving the annual report from the Environment Advisory Committee and also considering a request by the EAC that their committee get a copy of the supplemental Waste Plan report council requested on Jan 18 once it’s ready so that they can review it.

Wednesday, February 16
REGINA PLANNING COMMISSION (4 pm): An odd item caught my eye this week. RPC was advised a request to rezone 254 and 258 Dalgliesh Dr to allow the construction of two-unit semi-detached dwellings has been withdrawn by the developer. The heck, you say, I said. So I looked up the initial proposal which came in back in October. The duplexes looked fairly nice but the usual list of neighbourhood complaints came in — oh, such density will impact parking and garbage and, oh, the noise and what about our property values — so RPC sent the application back to administration to see if the developer would change their plans to accomodate the community concerns.

And it would seem this time around, the developer couldn’t be bothered.

Seriously, I have to confess I can see why developers aren’t tripping over themselves to build infill in this city. These were duplexes, for christsake. It’s not like someone was trying to sneak a skyscraper onto a 20 m wide lot. But duplexes apparently are enough to get people screaming bloody murder.

You know, I was keenly interested in all that talk at the infrastructure summit about the benefits of urban density, but if we’re going to see any of that here, someone is going to have to step up and do a better sales job on it.

As for the rest of RPC’s agenda, staff want to sell a municipal buffer strip (read: grassy knoll) so it can be turned into parking and there’s also a request to rezone a duplex at 4401 Dewdney so it can be converted into a daycare (the community approves).

And that’s it. To download complete agendas and reports so you can find out what’s being built where and how it will affect your parking, go to the city’s website.