Ward 9 Edmonton Coun. Bryan Anderson doesn’t have a day go by lately without complaints about about dandelions. They’re everywhere and he says it’s gotten to the point where you can’t even play sports anymore.
“I can show you locations where there are 50 to 60 plants per square metre and 18-inch dandelion stems, and if you kick a soccer ball, it’ll only roll half the distance because it gets impeded by weeds.”
A prime example, he says, is in Greenfield as the weather, with a good amount of rain and an equal amount of warm sunny days, has led these weeds to grow like weeds.
“There’s all kinds of reasons but my question is, is this the way we want public turf to look and if not, what can we do about it to make it better?”
Anderson says he’s already begun gathering information from other councillors and plans on getting cost estimates from the administration. He’d like to bring a motion to city council or a committee in a week or so that can logically hire more equipment or staff.
“I would like to try to get that happening and hopefully I can get something that might come back before the election.”
Where things stopped working? Anderson says it likely began with recent decisions.
“I’m not sure that the last couple of council members really understood the possibility of dandelions being so prolific in a patch of grass that the grass simply disappeared.”
Coun. Michael Walters wrote a blog post to complain about how the look of Edmonton has deteriorated.
“We’ve got to make sure what’s happened out there this spring doesn’t happen for the rest of the year and next spring,” he wrote. “It’s not good enough.”
“We need to ask our city operations staff: are we mowing enough? And if not, why not? Is it a resource question? Is it because we’re so big now and there’s so much ground to cover and we haven’t kept up with the number of mowers and resources to be able to keep a schedule that allows these places to get cut on time so we have that beautiful city that we all want.”
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