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Pay your $100, and the city will come out to your neighbourhood with orange pylons and traffic barriers, and officially block your street.

It’s a bit onerous, but every year, 66 neighbourhoods go through the formal $100 process.

For Coun. Ed Gibbons, all that rigmarole and expense looks like a barrier to getting more neighbourhoods out partying.

Photo by Rick Harcourt

“It’s hard to measure what $100 means to a group,” Gibbons said. “For some people, that $100 maybe be what stops them from even suggesting a party to their community.”

This week, Gibbons is asking city council to eliminate the $100 permit fee for all street parties.

“Our administration says ‘no’ all the time,” Gibbons said. “But $100 isn’t going to break the city.”

Gord Cebryk is the city’s branch manager for traffic operations. He said the city isn’t making money on street party permits. In fact, it barely covers the costs.

Cebryk said it costs about $110 in city resources and staff time to close and open streets and alleys for a neighbourhood gathering, which means they lose $10 on each permit. Still, he said, given that the city only took in $6,600 in permit fees last year, Cebryk said Edmonton could cope if the fees were abolished.

“This isn’t a very large amount. If there were 100,000 of them every year, it would be different, but this volume is not an issue.”

There’s another issue. The city doesn’t track the number of street parties that take place without buying that $100 permit. In fact, Cebryk said to the best of his knowledge, they’ve never even had a complaint about one. And if they did? Well, Cebryk thinks they would probably send someone to check it out. He doesn’t think the city would actually issue a ticket for closing a street or lane without paying the fee.