Your city hall is getting ready for a performance review

Folks, your City Manager and City Auditor Performance Evaluation Committee met this past Tuesday, May 19, 2026. It was a brisk meeting, by all accounts, where Councillor Parmar moved to adopt the agenda, and then moved to approve previous minutes, both of which carried 3-0. This committee, comprising Councillors Knack, Principe, and Parmar, had one main item on the docket: the City Auditor Annual Performance Review Update #1 (2026).

Now, here's where it gets interesting, or at least, as interesting as city council meetings tend to get when they're not discussing the latest iteration of winter road clearing.

* Councillor Principe moved that the committee meet in public. That passed, 3-0.

* Then Councillor Parmar moved that the committee meet in *private*, citing sections 20 (disclosure harmful to personal privacy) and 29 (advice from officials) of the *Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act*. That also passed, 3-0.

So, they voted to meet in public, then immediately voted to meet in private. It's like watching an Oilers power play sometimes – you're never quite sure if it's going to make sense in the end. The outcome was the approval of the City Auditor Annual Performance Review Process, as outlined in report OCC03561. What exactly that process entails, we'll have to wait and see, given the private session. Honestly though, it's probably just paperwork, but the optics are certainly... Edmonton.

Speaking of things that never change, "General Information" and "Routes and Schedules" remain the top two issues for 311 service requests, with 160,623 and 112,470 requests respectively. Some things are just constants, like the River Valley being forty times the size of Central Park, or the fact that Wayne Gretzky played here. Edmonton doesn't need your approval. Never did.

We'll be keeping an eye on how that performance review actually shakes out, and whether any of it sees the light of day.

Darren Fedoruk (@deepnorth_yeg)

Catch Keith and the crew breaking down all the civic happenings every morning – tune in live at mornings.live.