Each year, the City of Edmonton puts together an inventory of its infrastructure. This report gives Council an idea of the replacement value and present condition of all the different types of infrastructure that the City owns.
The total replacement value for all of the City’s infrastructure is $42.8 billion. That means that if every recreation facility, snow plough, and roadway fell victim to some kind of catastrophe tomorrow, it would take $42.8 billion dollars to replace all of it.
Overall, our infrastructure is in pretty good condition. 15% of our assets are in poor to very poor condition, which is worse than the national average - however, our infrastructure reinvestment is higher, which means we are putting our money to good use repairing infrastructure that was left to decay in previous years. The best infrastructure in terms of lifespan are drainage assets, which have an average lifespan of 125 years, compared to 70 years for other types of infrastructure.
Over the past several years, the City has progressively improved the average condition of our infrastructure assets. Programs like Neighbourhood Renewal, Arterial Renewal, and major drainage projects are improving the condition of our existing assets, and we are on pace to meet our physical condition targets by 2031.
In Ward 10, we are certainly seeing our share of infrastructure renewal. We have on-going drainage projects in Royal Gardens, Aspen Gardens, and Greenfield. Parkallen has already received neighbourhood renewal, and Allendale, Royal Gardens and Lansdowne are upcoming in the next two years.
All of the renewal projects that are currently approved in the three year Capital plan have designated funding. But we also received good news from the federal government, in the form of a promise for $700 million infrastructure dollars to Alberta in the next few months. We still don’t know how much of that funding will be coming to Edmonton, but it could go a long way towards renewing or building new projects.
With so much renewal work and new construction planned, and with the importance of tackling big issues like adapting to climate change and retrofitting inefficient building stock being front of mind, the Federal government’s investment in our city is needed soon.
We’ll need to wait and see what the federal government will give us to work with, but I’m pretty excited at the prospect of getting more Edmontonians back to work on new projects. This funding could be a mini-New Deal for Edmonton to carry us through this economic slump.
In NLP the Logical Levels of Therapy is a conversational method for assisting people to change strategies which are less than supportive of their goals.
The very fact that a person runs a particular strategy in a matter of seconds often means that they are not consciously aware that the outcomes they are producing are direct results of their own actions. They tend to attribute their outcomes to forces outside of themselves and thus place themselves at the effect side of the cause/effect equation.
This can also result in those people mistakenly believing that behavioural choices and alternative outcomes are actually unavailable to them. One purpose of the Logical Levels of Therapy method is to interrupt this limiting pattern and to assist people to access and expand the range of choices available to them.
Assist a person firstly to realise that they are actually at the cause side of the cause/effect equation (pacing).
Assist them secondly to realise that they have choices - they can choose to do things differently and adopt strategies more congruent with their goals (pacing/leading).
Lastly to assist them in moving from the effect to the cause side of the equation and in gaining increased choice and behavioural flexibility (leading).
If we dial the same number every time we use the telephone we will always get the same outcome - we'll always be connected to the one place associated with that number.
Taking responsibility for dialling, realising now that we can choose to dial new numbers, numbers which are more useful in making new connections, in reaching our desired goals will lead us there more quickly.
The first step then in the Logical Levels of Therapy is to assist a person to realise that they are ' dialling the numbers ' on the ' strategic telephone ' that leads them to their outcomes.
A person who has a problem with a strategy and feels that they are at the effect side of the cause/effect equation might say something like:-
Questions like these presuppose that X is something this person does rather than something which happens to them . It's one of the reframes used to assist the person in realising that their own actions dictate their outcomes.
Having identified X as a strategy the next step is to begin to elicit that strategy completely by asking the person to explain each step in the process in some detail.
As individual strategies are run in a matter of seconds this elicitation step can take some time and a number of repetitions to complete fully, particularly as this will probably be the very first time this person has analysed this experience in any detail or even been aware of the sequence of internal and external representations that they go through in order to produce the outcomes that they have been producing.
In order to fully recover all the steps in detail the person needs to fully associate into the experience, see what they saw at the time, hear what they heard, feel what they felt etc., and a detailed analysis with a little repetition will help to facilitate this.
Refer to the section on strategy elicitation for a detailed explanation of the process and remember to record each step of the strategy using the strategy notation documented earlier.
Once all the steps of the strategy, including the exit point, have been elicited it's time to move on to the second stage - changing the strategy.