A little over 5 years ago, I wrote a news story regarding attendance of the mayor and councillors of the City of Lethbridge.
With the Lethbridge municipal election coming up next week (although advanced polling has been underway since last week), someone came across that article while researching who to vote for this time around.
They reached out to me last week to see if I had something this time around for the most recent city council.
So, I combed through all the council meetings between 15 November 2021 and 16 September 2025 to check the attendance record for all 9 members of city council.
I looked at attendance for just the city council meetings. I excluded special city council meetings and the organizational meetings held every autumn. I also excluded committee meetings (such as standing policy committees and community issue committee).
As well, city councillors occassionally attended virtually, but I counted that as attending. If a councillor had to leave the meeting early, was late to the meeting, or had to be excused for conflict of interest, I included them as having attended.
16 September 2025 last council meeting
Here’s what I found.
From the first regular meeting after this city council was elected in 2021, there have been 78 city council meetings. The mayor—Blaine Hyggen—and one councillor—Belinda Crowson—were the only ones who attended all 78 meetings.
All the other councillors attended over 70 meetings.
Rajko Dodic missed the most meetings: 7.
That is less than half of the 16 that councillor Joe Mauro racked up in the previous city council.
Other than the 2 months this city council met in 2021, Dodic missed at least 1 meeting every year of this term, the only councillor to do so. In fact, he missed 2 meetings in 2022, 2023, and 2025.
Missing 7 meetings doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but it actually works out to roughly 9%. For every 11 meetings that city council held, Dodic missed 1 of them.
The next most absent councillor was John Middleton-Hope, missing more than half as many meetings as Dodic did.
Most of Middleton-Hope’s 4 absences were taken while he was campaigning as the United Conservative Party candidate in the Lethbridge–West byelection last year, which he lost to former city councillor Rob Miyashiro, incidentally.
All members of city council attended all city council meetings in 2018. To be honest though, there were only 3 that year, since they were elected partway through October, and there was a holiday break in December. Attending just 3 meetings wasn’t really much of an accomplishment.
In 2022, the majority of council attended all 20 meetings. Mark Campbell, Jeff Carlson, and Jenn Schmidt-Rempel each missed 1 meeting. Dodic missed 2.
Again, 5 city councillors attended all 21 meetings in 2023: Hyggen, Campbell, Carlson, Crowson, and Schmidt-Rempel. Middleton-Hope, Paladino, and Parker each missed just one meeting that year. Dodic bottomed out the list of meeting attendance, with 2 absences, again.
The last full year of the term, 2024, we had the fewest number of city councillors absent: just Dodic, Middleton-Hope, and Schmidt-Rempel. As mentioned earlier, Middleton-Hope took a leave of absence to run as a candidate in last year’s byelection, missing 3 meetings. The other two missed just one.
Like that of 2021, the data for 2025 is partial, given that we’re only three-quarters through the year. That being said, so far, everyone except Dodic attended all city council meetings; he missed two.
