Matt Stickland

On Wednesday, a cold and blustery Valentine’s Day, the city’s Parks and Recreation budget got a little bit of love and a special valentine from deputy mayor Cathie Deagle Gammon. But before Cupid could hit Parks and Rec with a budgetary arrow, the Budget Committee meeting, as always, started with public engagement. The city heard […]

Last Thursday, Feb. 15, the city of Halifax did something it hasn’t done in a while: adapted quickly to changing circumstances. The city has done this once before in recent memory, in response to COVID, and as it happens those COVID-centric amendments were one of the many things that changed with Halifax’s five-year strategic plan […]

On Tuesday Feb. 13, the city’s Budget Committee met and approved the Planning and Development Department’s $13 million budget. This year was the Budget Season™ debut for P&D’s new executive director Jacqueline Hamilton, as she replaced Kelly Dente who led this department last year. Before Hamilton could present P&D’s budget, the committee heard from the […]

With mayor Mike Savage announcing he won’t be seeking re-election in October, we Haligonians now become the hiring committee tasked with filling a vital leadership position. The person we choose needs to take charge and usher the Halifax Regional Municipality into an era of change and adaptability, as we scramble to correct past development mistakes […]

The Department of Public Works presented its budget after lunch on Friday Feb. 9. This was a procedurally weird Budget Committee meeting because the public engagement section was first thing in the morning, and in between those two events, council deferred the police budgets. All in all the Department of Public Works is a pretty […]

At Friday’s Budget Committee meeting, which was an extension of Wednesday’s Budget Committee meeting, city council decided to make a minor administrative change that will set the city up to successfully reform its police services, thanks to a motion from councillor Waye Mason. Mason argued that since public safety is more than just policing, and […]

Tuesday’s council meeting was dominated by food—specifically the fact that Halifax is in a bit of a pickle because it doesn’t produce much. But council couldn’t dig into the meat and potatoes of that debate right away, they had to do a tip of the hat and flipping of the bird before getting to work […]

The city’s budget process looks different this year, thanks to some changes that city council asked for when it adopted councillor Tim Outhit’s radical motion from November 2023. But some councillors are struggling with these changes, so at the start of the Budget Committee meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 31, they got an explanation about how […]

At a budget meeting on Friday Feb. 2, the HRM approved Halifax Public Libraries’ proposed $25 million budget for 2024/25, an increase of $1.5 million from last year. What makes this a bitter pill to swallow, even if it was pre-approved in December, is that nearly half of the increase—$692,355 of your hard-earned tax dollars—is […]

On Wednesday Jan. 24, the city’s Budget Committee met for its inaugural meeting of the 2024 Budget Season. In this meeting, councillor Sam Austin got a more fulsome explanation about the hard work the Department of Public Works is doing to ensure that history will not be kind to this cohort of councillors. The DPW’s […]