City Council amended a number of bylaws at last night's meeting (August 21).

Council unanimously voted to pass Bylaw No. B-27/2017, which amended the Smoking Bylaw signage. Before the amendment, smoking signs were required to be a minimum of 20cm by 26cm. Staff requested the bylaw be changed so that the minimum size of smoking signage could be 10cm by 10cm. The change will make it easier to post smoking signs in City vehicles, which wasn't possible prior to the amendment.

Council also unanimously did away with an obsolete firearms bylaw from 1963 by passing Bylaw No. B-24/2017. That bylaw rescinded Bylaw 425, which prohibited discharging firearms in the Village of Airdrie's limits. The bylaw became obsolete when the Community Standards Bylaw was passed in 2012, as firearms are now regulated by that law.

Finally, Council unanimously passed an amendment to the Community Standards Bylaw that also had to do with firearms. Under the bylaw, only residents living within a shoot zone were allowed to shoot firearms in the City. A shoot zone was defined as a ranch farm larger than 12.14 hectares, or a quarter section of land with less than twenty residential buildings. The bylaw did allow an exemption, where a citizen could request a permit from the City Manager to shoot a gun within Airdrie's urban limits in order to deal with nuisance animals.

After the City recently received a request from a citizen that wanted to shoot pigeons within the City, they reevaluated the exemption and deemed it inappropriate due to safety concerns, leading them to ask that the exemption and the definition of a "shooting permit" be removed from the Community Standards Bylaw. Council unanimously agreed to remove both the exemption and and the definition.

Anyone living within the City's annexed zone on a rural property will still have the ability to shoot firearms on their property.

 

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