City Hall update

The YMCA/CBC project notwithstanding, Halifax council is now in a bit of a holding pattern before the annual budget debates begin in April. There are, however a few issues slowly making their way through the process, as follows:

Stadium Council was originally scheduled to review stadium options this Tuesday (March 20), but nothing was presented to councillors. Instead, mayor Peter Kelly announced that council will address the issue next Tuesday, March 27. Very likely, the pursuit of a stadium for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup will fall flat on its face, and council will attempt to spin the failure as not a complete waste because the stadium studies, costing about $375,000, can be recycled for a future stadium not tied to the FIFA proposal. Then, when that future stadium is considered, the FIFA stadium studies will be thrown out and more costly studies will be commissioned.

Convention Centre Depending on how you looked at it, Peter MacKay’s announcement last August that the federal government would join its provincial and municipal counterparts in funding a new convention centre for Halifax signaled either the salvation of downtown or a gigantic waste of public money. But, seven months later, with the world financial industry in disarray, developer Joe Ramia has yet to find a tenant for the financial centre part of the development, and so a rat-filled swimming pool continues to blight the middle of town. Ramia keeps saying he’s still looking, but if he doesn’t find a tenant soon, increasing construction costs will mean the entire deal will have to be re-worked, leading to another round of political hand-wringing, public debate and Trade Centre Limited dissembling. In the meanwhile, we get one more summer of great patio sunshine on Argyle Street.

Solar city Perhaps the best thing ever to come out City Hall is the Solar City proposal, which will provide technical advice and financing for the installation of between 500 and 700 solar water heating systems on private homes each year. Tuesday, council had a “first reading” of bylaw changes needed for the program, with those changes scheduled to be passed next week. Financing, through the Federal Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund, is “imminent,” says a staff report, and if all goes well, the first solar panels will be installed in June.

Burnside-Sackville connector Council Tuesday took all the steps required of the city to make the highway a reality—that is, it agreed to sell some land in Burnside Park to the province for the expressway’s right-of-way, and agreed to extend Akerley Boulevard to the new road. The connector now sits with the province, which, although it is committed on paper to drastic reductions in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, is committed in reality to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on highway construction that will serve to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2012.