The City of Medicine Hat, this council and past councils, has always placed a high value on ensuring that people have equal opportunity to access city facilities. We have created partnerships with not-for-profits and social clubs to allow for free skating or swimming, or scheduled free bus rides to our local park, our man-made lake. We are actually in the process of working on a fair entry policy that would allow families with low incomes to access our recreational facilities and our transit at a lower cost.
The city also partners with the housing society, and we provide free land to build affordable housing units in the community. We have a community worker program funded by the City of Medicine Hat that is embedded within the school system. These workers act as a conduit and as a one-stop shop to help families to navigate systems within the community.
Our city council also recently unanimously approved a motion to support, in principle, our poverty reduction leadership team, and funded the creation of a report, a community call to action. We had that launched yesterday.
We also own our own utilities and are able to boast some of the lowest utility rates in the country, and the lowest in the province. However, moving forward, this will be a major challenge, as we have a carbon tax that we have to collect on behalf of the other levels of government and it will be passed on to our ratepayers.
Our community also has a robust program that we call a “HAT smart” program. It's a renewable energy conservation program. If you drive around the city, you'll see solar panels on the roofs of most of the businesses and the houses. That was a partnership between the City of Medicine Hat and the residents. We had a huge buy-in, $4.4 million, with rebates on a per capita basis. It's unheard of across this country. We are very proud of our leadership in this area.