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 Ecology Action Centre’s Kourtney Dunsby, the only member of the public who took the opportunity to speak at the meeting. It was not Dunsby’s Budget Season™ debut. Dunsby pointed out that there is a lot of good work happening in the HRM, but a lot of that work is disjointed and not yet, not fully or not at all funded, depending on the project or priority. She pointed out that a lot of the HRM’s planning on things like the environment is not part of holistic planning, which means that sometimes, like this year, the Green Network Plan is not being funded.
After Dunsby’s presentation, Hamilton presented her department’s budget. They asked for (and have so far been approved to get, pending ratification in April) a bunch of funding to hire suburban planners and transportation engineers. These new hires seem to be the missing link that has prevented some keystone strategic plans, like the Integrated Mobility Plan, from being implemented on the local tactical level.
The problem is that we only have a good grasp on the negative side of the equation: We know what our development and transportation can’t or shouldn’t be in the future. We also know what the individual pieces look like, meaning we know how to design the infrastructure we need (in theory). And we know a lot of what we want our city to look like in the future. We just haven’t done any planning to put all the pieces together. It is possible to piece together a future where Cole Harbour Road is re-developed as a people-centric main street, and build up around it. It is also possible to develop two complete communities in Cole Harbour on either side of the highway—Colby Village to the south of Cole Harbour Road and Nantucket to the north—by embracing the changes demanded by the federal Housing Accelerator Fund that encourage mixed-use and inclusionary zoning. But each of these ideas would have a very different use for Otago Drive. Without a plan in place we ended up doing neither, wasting good money after bad on auto-centric infrastructure.
With the new planning and engineering hires, Halifax should be able to break free of its infrastructure inaction two years early.
Hamilton told the committee that her department had seen building permit-issuing time go down, even with the direction from council to drop everything and work on the bylaw changes required to make Halifax eligible for Housing Accelerator Fund money. She also told the committee that the Centre Plan was working as it’s supposed to, and most of the permits the city has issued recently have not been for single-family homes, which is a change from past years. Growth in the urban area guided by the Centre Plan is outpacing suburban growth for the first time in three years. It seems we have finally turned a corner and have started to stem the tide of suburban sprawl.
As part of the sweeping changes required to qualify for the Housing Accelerator fund (easy-to-read explainer here), the feds want cities to find ways to allow some development of heritage properties. Meanwhile, Halifax’s Centre Plan calls for establishing two new heritage districts in Dartmouth. So at the budget meeting, councillor Sam Austin wanted to know if there’s a risk of these goals conflicting. He pointed out that planning for heritage districts takes a long time, upwards of five years, so wouldn’t that really slow heritage development down? Councillor David Hendsbee had a similar concern, without the urban perspective: Wouldn’t all this suburban planning slow down the rural plan? Hamilton told both councillors that the city needs to get better at planning so it can plan more than one thing at a time and have planning take less time. The planning department’s budget requests were in support of doing that.
Councillor Patty Cuttell pointed out that something called inclusionary zoning could be quite helpful in reforming the suburbs, and asked if there was a plan to bring it to Halifax. Hamilton said that this was something the city was working on, and it would be Soon™. Or maybe it’s actually soon: The city recently put out a tender to get a market analysis done on inclusionary zoning, and that report’s due date is April 12, 2024.
