Downtown businesses deserve better

By Lethbridge Herald on December 7, 2022.

Mayor Hyggen:

Can you please review the photo attached and provide some direction on what else our business (Lethbridge Herald) has to do to address the ongoing vandalism, setting of fires against our building, our homeless people leaving their drug paraphernalia, fecal matter, urine and other “garbage” that we are left to deal with. 

It puts our staff, customers and the public that walk by our location in an unsafe position.

When our staff have to clean up this ongoing (daily!) mess or suggest that these people move on, they are at risk. 

And the homeless are likely to take their mess or vandalism to another downtown business for them to have to deal with. 

We have just spent over $3,000 (plus help from a city grant) to install roll shutters on two of our four entrances. While that has improved the situation at those two locations, they are just using our other entrance(s) to live/party in during the night. 

Is it a realistic expectation that downtown businesses should be the ones that continue to bear this burden?

Every downtown business is already challenged by high annual property taxes plus the additional downtown levy each year – and nothing changes with the mess we are forced to deal with, virtually every day. 

I would appreciate some response from your office as downtown businesses deserve better than this. 

Ryan McAdams

Group publisher

Alberta Newspaper Group LP