This is part of a continuing series recounting what City Council does each week. You can see last week's post here.

There was a fierce debate on the sale of river valley land for an 80-storey tower with 18 speakers giving their opinions at Executive Committee. This project won't be resolved quickly and there are many points at which the whole project could be canned. For example, if the rezoning of the project fails at Public Hearing, then the entire deal will be moot.

You can see the entire process and all the potential stopping points on page 3 of the report(pdf).

The user experience of ETS came up at Community Services Committee. Among some of the suggested improvements were:

• developing a code of conduct for transit riders and operators
• partnering with events to include transit in the ticket price
• refurbishing some existing transit stations
• and adding 33 air-conditioned buses to the fleet (adding air conditioning to the existing fleet was described as a ridiculous amount of money by Michael Oshry last year)

Smart card access to transit will be coming as well.

The Accessibility Advisory Committee gave a report, suggesting that housing and transit are the next big issues for accessibility.

This Sunday (Feb 19), the Metro Line is slated to move a full 50km/h through intersections. This is another forward step on a long (long) process to get the Metro Line completed to the specification we paid for. The next step is to get the trains running at full frequency again by fully integrating the new signaling system in with the Capital Line. You can read more about that in my post critiquing the lack of open-ness of the Metro Line project.

Continuing the focus on trains and transit, Don Iveson had a live broadcast on Facebook talking about Edmonton's LRT strategy.

Administration began consultation on their plan to add bag searches and metal detectors to council meetings, as well as build a wall in council chambers. You can read about why I think this should absolutely not happen.

That's all for this week! If you think these updates are useful, please give me a follow on Twitter or a follow on Facebook and let me know.