After an exciting off-season in which we decided to change up our roster at City Hall, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is here. That’s right, we’re talking budget season!
For those who need an introduction or refresher, budget season is the planning period of months from now to April 2025 when the city sets its budget for the next fiscal year. It’s a preview into how our city will operate in 2025/26, as municipal business units like the police and libraries set out their plans and seek approval for their budgets for the coming year.
Right now we’re in the preliminary stages of budget season—to extend the sports metaphor, we’re technically in budget pre-season. Before dealing with requests from the business units, city council needs to find out things like how property tax assessments are shaping up (i.e. learning how much rate changes will affect property taxes/municipal revenues), which will take a few meetings. On a procedural note, budget debates all happen during budget committee meetings. But since budget committee meetings and and council regular council meetings are all the same people, budget committee meetings are often scheduled in conjunction with regular meetings of council. But before any of that, at this week’s budget committee/regular Tuesday council meeting of Dec 10, council pre-approved the 2025/26 capital budget.
Halifax’s capital budget needs pre-approval because even though the ongoing collapse of Earth’s life support systems—global heating—means the construction season is getting longer, it’s still really short. To deal with that, given the city’s incredibly cumbersome administrative process to award public contracts to private companies, the city needs to start the paperwork for construction tenders in December 2024 if it wants to be able to shovel money out the door when construction season begins in spring/summer 2025. During Tuesday’s debate about the capital budget, staff explained that just because council gives approval now, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t cancel their approval later in the budget process, but cancelling a project after the paperwork has started is much easier than starting a project mid-season without having done any of the paperwork.
Staff also explained to council that the city is switching to a four-year budget process in the realm of capital projects. Since capital projects are multi-year affairs it makes sense to have a multi-year approach to capital budgeting, and that starts this fiscal year. City staff explained that even though council will be setting the capital budget for the next four years, things approved this year can be changed later, much like the advance tenders process. But the benefit of a four-year outlook, in short, is that it should give the city more predictability in administering capital projects, which should decrease the costs to deliver them while at the same time keeping the flexibility in the process to allow councillors to exert their power on our behalf should things need changing mid-flight.
This four-year capital budgeting plan is another in a long line of governance changes—from routine annual policy reviews, to better strategic plan implementation, to restructuring the bureaucracy’s leadership to increase institutional flexibility—that has been happening in the city’s bureaucracy ever since the city hired Cathie O’Toole as chief administrative officer back in January 2023.
All this to say, the city’s bureaucracy is in the process of transforming itself into a government capable of adapting to the ongoing collapse of our life support systems and the slow decline of the American hegemonic world order that we’ve been living in since 1945. The only thing that will hold us back is the people we elect as our leaders.
With that, let’s check in about how they did at Tuesday, December 10’s budget meeting and regular council meeting.
Things that passed
Budget committee pre-season meeting: advance tenders
The budget committee debates got a little spicy at two points. In the meeting, the first point of contention was a new sports field at Lockview High School. The plan to build an artificial turf field and an accompanying fieldhouse at Lockview was originally announced with much fanfare and commitments from other levels of government to kick in some funding.
After that announcement the price tag of the field spiked, and as staff write in their report, “The tender prices are higher than anticipated due to work associated with servicing (sewer, water and power). In addition, the original $4,900,000 budget estimate was not prepared by HRM staff or developed from a detailed design. If additional funding is not approved ($7,200,000 vs $4,900,000), a reduced scope will be considered.”
This kicked off a heated debate for a few reasons. The first is that due to the unsustainable nature of the HRM’s historic development patterns, our taxes aren’t enough to pay for the services and amenities we need, and as a result the community around Lockview had to fundraise $213,000 to get this project off the ground. If the project gets killed, that fundraising was all done for naught. Councillor Sam Austin pointed out that budgets from other levels of government are always for flat amounts, not a sliding share of the price, so the city is always on the hook for cost overruns in projects like this. Mayor Andy Fillmore told his peers that based on his experience in the federal government, federal and provincial budgets don’t change once set, so it’s unlikely for the city to get more money now that the costs have gone up.
Councillor Patty Cuttell chimed in say the fact the cost of this project ballooned after approval by council, and the fact that this always seems to happen to HRM projects, leads her to believe that the HRM’s capital tendering process has some pretty serious issues that are creating risks with the city’s institutional credibility.
Councillor Laura White asked what the opportunity cost for funding the Lockview field was. Opportunity costs, for those who don’t know, are the things that can’t happen after you choose a course of action. For example, if your family lives in Ontario and your partner’s family lives in PEI, if you choose to visit your partner’s family in PEI on Christmas Day, the opportunity cost would be spending Christmas Day with your family. Since the city needs almost double the money it originally planned for the fieldhouse, the opportunity cost is the city not having a couple million dollars to spend on something else. Councillor Tony Mancini picked up on White’s question, saying the fact that council was re-debating this without talking about opportunity costs is a real gap in the HRM’s process. But gap or not, the increased funding for the Lockview field will go ahead as this was passed in principle as part of the advance tenders motion.
Speaking of opportunity costs and risks to institutional credibility, the other big issue in the advance tenders debate was the cost of transportation infrastructure. Councillor Trish Purdy punched into the debate to ask what the city’s priorities are, considering bike lanes were $8.2 million this coming fiscal year and sidewalk renewals were only getting $1 million, plus there is no money for new sidewalks.
The city’s chief operations officer Brad Anguish dismissed Purdy’s question due to the obvious nature of the surface-level information. Or, as Anguish told Purdy, non-car infrastructure spending is peanuts when you compare the different types of transportation spending, mainly automotive.
But if you really dig into the numbers, the city is planning to spend just over $8 million in the next budget on the city’s AAA bike network, and the total cost to complete the city’s planned AAA bike network is currently estimated at around $46.9 million. These bike lanes are new infrastructure, and their maintenance will predominately come out of the city’s operations budgets in the future. Meanwhile, road maintenance is so expensive that its routine maintenance is in the budget as a capital expense which averages over $50 million a year, with this year’s annual repair bill coming in at around $63 million. Even if you assume that every single person in the Department of Public Works ($28 million in salaries) and the Parks Department ($30 million) is only doing bike path work and add this year’s advance capital spending on bike lanes ($4.1 million) and add the million required to fix a few decades of neglected sidewalk maintenance, all of that only breaks even with this one year’s worth of capital costs for road maintenance.
But that isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. If you were to do a comparison like that, the entirety of capital expense for the city’s planned bike infrastructure is expected to be $46.9 million. Replacing just one automotive interchange at one intersection costs $122 million if you want to do it right (i.e. Cogswell) and $103 million if you want to prioritize car traffic and make things worse for everyone (i.e. Windsor Street Exchange).
Related
City staff go rogue, ignore council’s instructions
And since we’re on the topic of priorities, when you examine what municipal policies are applied to projects on a regular basis by staff, the only priorities the city generally tries to achieve are getting the most congestion possible on HRM roads and wasting as much money as possible in the process of making life demonstrably worse for everyone. Because regardless of municipal intent, every time we spend money on car infrastructure to try and increase vehicle capacity, we get more cars and trucks on the road. As vehicles get bigger, they become less efficient with space. When stationary, two modern pickup trucks (2×20 feet) take up as much space as one bus (1×40 feet). When factoring in an average stopping distance at 50kph of 115 feet, two not-speeding trucks require 270ft of road to move through the city. When you compare that to a bus requiring 155 feet in motion, it becomes painfully clear that private cars are so inefficient with space they are what’s causing congestion. (Or forget the math: the important part is that according to the best available evidence going back to ancient Rome, it is impossible to plan and build infrastructure for drivers and also decrease congestion.)
Not willing to let the physics that govern the natural world and centuries of evidence right up to books from 2024 stand in their way, city staff are planning to upgrade 10 intersections in the HRM. The HRM’s traffic authority Roddy MacIntrye explained that his department does not use the best available evidence generated by experts around the world, nor does the city learn lessons from other cities that have achieved Halifax’s stated goals, nor do the city’s engineers let the laws of physics dictate their work. Instead, the city’s professional engineers use a data-driven approach to justify wasting municipal resources on road safety whack-a-mole style, rather than making systemic improvements to road safety and congestion alleviation.
Councillor Jean St-Amand (continuing his very strong start to his rookie term) put MacIntrye on blast, saying the HRM’s approach is extremely limited by the data it collects. For example, earlier in the meeting councillor Janet Steele pointed out that the city doesn’t build crosswalks unless enough people are already crossing the road. But since people just choose not to cross dangerous roads without a crosswalk, there are never enough people to justify a crosswalk, so the data never supports building pedestrian infrastructure. That is until people start getting hit by drivers and dying, which cranks up the political pressure, and whatever obstacles previously justified municipal inaction disappear.
Nevertheless, such methodology around data is why the city is wasting money on the top 10 most dangerous traffic lights, instead of following the HRM’s strategic plans. Municipal plans from HalifACT to the Intergrated Mobility Plan direct staff to spend our tax money on reducing the number of cars on the road, which would result in safer streets, less-congested streets and more tax revenue, yet city staff are recommending the city spends more money for more-dangerous, more-congested streets which will generate less municipal tax revenue. The good and the bad infrastructure spending planned for the HRM all survived budget committee, and the advance tenders were sent to the council meeting right after budget committee. With that, the first debate in the budget pre-season wrapped up.
The regular meeting of council.
The normal meeting of council (held right after Budget Committee) started off with consideration of deferred business, mainly a motion from councillor Cuttell who was seeking an update on the Moving Forward Together Plan, Halifax’s Transit overarching planning plan. This was first passed in 2016 with transportation planning assumptions straight out of 2014 when this plan was first started. It’s been eight years, and Transit’s planning up to and including last year has been… less than ideal.
Related
Halifax Transit planning for a ridership decrease
Councillor Purdy chimed into the debate to say that the bus is so bad, multiple people have told her they had to go out and get cars. She said this like it was some sort of mistake, but it’s not. That is obviously the desired outcome of transit planners in the HRM. According to Canadian Real Estate Magazine, the land around transit hubs is some of the most valuable real estate in any city. Since the city of Halifax primarily generates revenue through property taxes, it should have an incentive to encourage development near transit hubs and thus generate some of the highest tax revenues of any property in the HRM. But does the HRM surround its transit hubs with shops and homes? Don’t be dumb. According to the designs of our terminals, people who take Transit are expected to drive there.
The good news is that this motion from Cuttell to
check in on Transit’s plan might be a sneaky good one, because Moving Forward Together is not being updated per se because the city is looking to adapt its transportation planning. This motion will come back with more information right before councillors will make big decisions about Transit’s budget during budget season. On top of that, Halifax Transit’s getting a new director, the union has a new head and most if not all of our new councillors were elected on promises of massive investments in transit. Set your expectations high and then communicate those expectations (and your willingness to pay higher taxes or parking fees) to your councillor to help inform their votes this budget season.
Also deferred from the last meeting was the staff report about advising councillors on which staff reports city staff should keep, and which staff reports city staff think should be tossed. All of the councillors took the extra week to do their homework except for councillor Mancini, who asked for this to be pushed to later in the meeting so he could do some last-minute cramming. Ultimately councillors decided to stop work on these staff reports and continue work on these staff reports. The last-minute cramming must have paid off for Mancini as his staff report on updating nuisance bylaws was added to the keep list. This is a pretty weedy issue that doesn’t affect many people, but the city’s nuisance bylaws aren’t written very well. As a result, some people are getting inadvertently bullied by the city for being poor, old or some other extenuating circumstance, which is not really a policy outcome we want from our bylaws.
At 6pm, council held a public hearing that turned into a royal rumble, as members of the public weighed in on the fate of the Cemetary Keeper’s House at 1259 South Park Street. The public wanted to see the building kept and maintained, not demolished. City staffers jumped into the debate to lay down the law, specifically the Heritage Properties Act, which does not have any clauses to force property owners to maintain their property. Staff said they could maybe use the nuisance bylaws from the paragraph above, but that would force people to fix buildings without necessarily keeping the heritagey-ness of the building. Ultimately, due to a piece of legislation from 1843, the property can’t be used for anything other than cemetery stuff. Thanks to the house’s condition and not being allowed to do anything with it anyways, council voted to let it be demolished. The stonework will be kept, and signs will be posted to explain why this building was significant. This was a strong debate performance from councillors White and Nancy Hartling.
Council expanded the boundaries of the Land Titles Clarification Area around North Preston, East Preston, Cherry Brook and Lake Loon on the consent agenda.
The province is making the city adopt a new code of conduct, and council approved it—because they have to. After an initial read of this code of conduct, it sounds like conflict of interest is more stringently defined and there are now consequences for breaching this code in the form of 13 new punishments AKA sanctions.
Council approved naming some private roads and renaming some public ones.
Council is changing its tax sale policies; in the future, the city will not advertise tax sales in the newspaper and just do it on the Halifax.ca website instead. This motion featured a very long, mostly irrelevant-to-the-issue-at-hand debate about saving $21,000 a year. $21,000. A. Year. During the debate city staff said that these ads are quite expensive because they include all of the details of every property in every tax sale. Councillor Hartling asked staff why they couldn’t just save money by running cheaper ads that say something like “property tax sale on Sunday, all of the details on Halifax.ca” instead of full-page ads with all the details.
A development on 10 Kirk Road was held up at community council and brought to full council because councillor Cuttell wanted more information about a footpath on the property. This motion, which passed through council with three votes against, is directing staff to write a staff report about “the tow path which crosses the property located at 10 Kirk Road.” This debate was particularly spicy as councillor Cuttell wasn’t in chambers to put her motion on the floor. Councillor Shawn Cleary did instead so he could speak against it, which he got to do first since he put the motion on the floor. In his arguments, he told his peers that councillor Cuttell was being a “spanner” delaying work by asking for more information. Having returned to chambers, Cuttell chimed in with a point of order to say that “spanner” was unparliamentary language. Cleary fired back saying that should have been a point of privilege instead of a point of order, before saying he’d withdraw the language.
After the slapfight off the top of the debate, council got into the weeds about this path. It crosses about 20 properties around the Northwest Arm by Frog Lake. The development proposed for 10 Kirk Road is 15 single-unit residences, and clause 3.10.6 of the development agreement says that the developer has to maintain the path as stipulated by schedule B. And this is how the city manages the path:
Cuttell wanted to know if there was anything the city could do that was stronger than the development agreement, to ensure the path stayed available to the public. In theory the city can get an easement, which is a legal guarantee for access. Still, as the city has been learning over the years with Silver Sands, an easement doesn’t prevent a land owner from just not abiding by the relatively powerless enforcement options. So is an easement a good idea for this path? Another option is the city rezoning the land to make it always a footpath, but a recent Supreme Court decision suggests rezoning the land might force the city into shelling out huge wads of cash in de facto appropriations claims. Institutionally speaking, the city doesn’t really know what its powers to dictate function with land use are at the moment. So even though stalling a development isn’t the most efficient way to go about it, councillors should really start getting some clarity around this, and hopefully that’s what this report starts to provide.
Last Monday, the Grants Committee voted to provide more property tax relief for non-profit and registered Canadian charities. This move is expected to cost the city less than $350,000 in lost revenue, and was approved by council at this meeting. There was some brief discussion about tax philosophy, which was both too weedy and not relevant enough to even be included in this publication—which any of you who’ve made it this far know has very low bars for both.
And finally, also out of Grants Committee, the city proposed changing how it funds things in this city to move away from the whim of yearly grants toward more stable funding models. Since good governance is in vogue municipally, it also passed at council.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.