By Aaron Mahoney (@Mahones93 on Twitter)

New Downtown Clean and Safe Strategy designed to tackle issues related to local drug crisis

Jan 14, 2019 | 2:59 PM

LETHBRIDGE – With a New Year come some of the same challenges facing Lethbridge, but a new city-led strategy developed in collaboration with various stakeholders, businesses and residents will look to combat the issues of the drug crisis – specifically in the downtown.

The Downtown Clean and Safe Strategy will highlight, coordinate, and implement all of the initiatives, programs, and tasks the City of Lethbridge is doing with respect to addressing “negative perceptions” on cleanliness and safety in the downtown.

Some of the initiatives and tasks included in the strategy will impact some of the large underlying issues of the drug crisis like homelessness, addiction, and unemployment. But the strategy isn’t attempting to solve those issues specifically.

That’s part of the larger strategy to deal with the drug crisis in the community.

An action plan as part of the strategy will be focused on seven different pillars:

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– Enforcement

– Security

– Outreach

– Cleaning

– Promotion

– Education

– Built Environment Improvement

More background on each pillar can be found here.

City Manager Bramwell Strain says this plan came from several things, one of which was talking to business owners in the downtown, and various stakeholders like the Chamber of Commerce and Downtown BRZ.

“What we looked at was what we had already put in place through the budget process that were through the police service, but there were some gaps in there,” Strain continued. “That’s what we looked at this time, what were those gaps, and how could we promote downtown more. That’s including the cleanliness of the downtown which is something we hadn’t addressed and a few other issues.”

They put those pieces in place and quickly got everyone on board to move these things forward.

“They’re moving at very quick speeds, some of these things will start as early as next week. They’ll continue on throughout the summer into the fall, and once the Ambassador Watch program is in full swing, we’ll re-evaluate where we are. One of the big pieces of the process is reporting back to council and the public as to what the results were.”

One of the stakeholders not mentioned is the internal ad-hoc committee on the drug crisis, which Strain says is just about to come to fruition after consultation, which will oversee the implementation of the DCSS, include key representatives from city departments who have a direct role in downtown cleanliness and safety and remain flexible to respond to changing needs.

“When I first got here there was a resolution put forward to create an ad-hoc group to deal with substance abuse. It’s taken a little while to get that off the ground because we went backwards by starting with community consultations and stakeholder consultations, but that’s part of the larger strategy.

“What that larger plan is moving to is to deal with all of the substance abuse issues that we have. That includes the Supervised Consumption Site, cleanliness, prevention, enforcement, and dealing with some of the gaps with daily meaningful activity to get people out of rehab and into jobs placements. There’s that full continuum, housing’s in that continuum as well, and that’s what that group is going to look at,” Strain said.

That’s the big picture, but Strain says the DCSS is a piece of that pie.

As far as the wording in some of the documents, on negative perceptions of cleanliness and safety in the downtown, Strain isn’t suggesting for a second these things aren’t real.

“I am suggesting that from time to time they get slightly overblown. Whether it be through social media or elsewhere, suddenly if one needle is found and the picture is shared it can proliferate where people think it’s a lot more than what it is. That’s where I was going with the wording, but it doesn’t matter because perception is reality,” Strain stated, adding once that perception is out there that’s what they’re combatting.

The City will be rolling out a more comprehensive communications strategy in partnership with the DCSS to relay what’s being done to members of the community.