Halifax’s city council met on Tuesday, Jan 14, for a painfully boring meeting. A lot of the debate was on things like survey methodology, what the Property Valuation Services Corporation does, and not double-checking technical documents. If this meeting were a game of soccer, it’d be a comfortable 1-0 victory against a team we should beat. In a championship season, this game is unremarkable, as it’s just another in a series of games of a well-oiled championship team. In a losing season, the game stands out as a muted highlight in an otherwise lustreless season. Our new council is only a few games into their season, so it’s hard to say how much shine this meeting will bring to this season, but it was a win and that’s not nothing.
One of the main topics of debate was the annual resident survey, which was grim. The debate itself was about the survey’s methodology, but the survey found that only 43% of people think they get good or very good value for their taxes in Halifax. This is a drop from 72% in 2021. Nova Scotians are the most heavily taxed population in Canada, yet our housing and transportation are unsustainable. So the city is hemorrhaging money, but council keeps making decisions to keep fees and taxes low, with the foreseeable result of not having the money to fix our crumbling infrastructure or hire enough firefighters.
But who can say, really, why people don’t think they’re getting good value for their taxes?
The good news is that Halifax has instructed the city bureaucracy to fix the fundamental unsustainability in the city’s finances, by defining some priorities for staff to implement. The bad news is that city staff updated council on those priorities, and in just under half of them, 45%, staff are making no progress or failing. This was submitted to council as an information item on the agenda—a bit under the radar with no presentation from staff to council, and no chance for councillors to debate it. But councillor Tony Mancini noticed it, and asked staff to bring it forward to the next meeting with a presentation. He also requested that it happen early in the meeting, as he wants the CAO present to be able to answer questions. He likely wants this because the scope of failure of Halifax’s bureaucracy is incredibly alarming.
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It’s a masterclass in catastrophic public administration. It honestly gets worse every time I read it. I went into this introduction thinking I was going to write about the cost of roads—and I will get there—but this report is driving me insane. I’m genuinely losing it. For example, the HRM maintains 2,037km worth of roads. Now let’s consider this update, included in the strategic update about registered vehicles on the road.
Cars and small SUVs average 4.5 meters in length, and pickups vary from 5 to 5.7 meters. Based on provincial vehicle splits and taking the low end of 5m for trucks, that gives us about 722km of light trucks and 162km of cars in the city, or about 884km of vehicles for 2,037km of road. (Just a note: these lengths are for stationary vehicles. When travelling at 50kph, all these cars and trucks take up 914km as each vehicle needs an additional 35m for stopping, which is 21m to react and 14m to stop.) Nevertheless, if every registered vehicle was stopped somewhere on an HRM road, the roads would be 43% full. This 43% does not include trucking or vehicles registered outside the HRM.
In 2024, keeping the same assumptions with the increase to 202,865 registered vehicles, we will have about 811km of light trucks and 182km of cars. HRM’s roads would be 48% full.
Physics suggests this is not a sustainable trend, and according to the memo attached to Tuesday’s agenda, vehicle registrations are a metric that staff are tracking to achieve a council priority. According to the “Memorandum from the Chief Administrative Officer dated December 31, 2024 re: Strategic Performance Report 2023/24” this priority is defined as having an “Affordable & Sustainable Mobility Network,” in Halifax and we’ll get there by using “a responsible investment approach that maximizes the use of existing mobility infrastructure and aligns with climate and social equity goals.”
Oh, okay. Well, I hope someday we will solve the mystery of why congestion’s getting worse.
Anyway, back to the point.
The reason why staff don’t have enough information is because the city doesn’t include other municipal documents like “the budget” or have any performance indicators that include things like “municipal financial trends” or “returns on investment” or “money” to track how staff were doing with the council responsibility about a “responsible investment approach.” Because if they did that, they’d show that staff decision-making in transportation for the past 20 years or so has been a huge liability.
Halifax Transit’s annual budget last year was $68 million, which included $145 million in expenditures and $76.8 million in revenues. If you remove solid waste spending—the whole garbage, compost and recycling apparatus—the Department of Public Works budget is predominately automotive infrastructure support, which cost $77.9 million last year. All of these expenditures are business unit operational expenses found in the Budget and Business Unit Plan.
However, unlike Halifax Transit, routine maintenance for automotive infrastructure is also found in the capital budget. Most business units, like Halifax Transit, use the capital budget for large one-time spending, like new buses or large projects, like new bus stations. Automotive infrastructure is so eye-wateringly expensive that routine road maintenance is in DPW’s capital, not operational budget. In last year’s capital budget routine maintenance on roads cost us $60 million. Combining the two DPW budgets gives roads a total annual cost of $138 million for road maintenance last year: $67,746 per kilometre of road.
The good news is that, like Halifax Transit, the Department of Public Works does cost recovery because sustainability is a priority of council. That’s why Halifax started charging a dollar more for parking on Saturdays in 2023, and that’s why parking fees in fiscal 2023/24 increased by $469,000 to $7.6 million in revenue, which helps to bring the cost of road maintenance down to a much more affordable $130.5 million: $64,064 per kilometre of road.
In 2023, Halifax earned $37 million in revenue by charging disabled people for taking the bus, this brought the cost of operating Access-A-Bus down to $7.3 million in net expenditures.
Oh, okay.
But who can say, really, why people don’t think they’re getting good value for their taxes?
Things that passed
According to the municipal budget website, Tuesday’s meeting was a key budget date because it was the day the council got its strategic plan snapshot and update to inform budget discussions. You know, the one that lays bare bureaucratic failures to achieve council priorities attached as a memo, and which wouldn’t have been debated unless Mancini forced the issue?
But who can say, really, why people don’t think they’re getting good value for their taxes?
It was a key budget date for another reason: Everyone’s favourite administrative body, the Property Valuation Services Corporation, gave a presentation to council. In our council preview story, The Coast predicted PVSC would be laying out the tax rate Tuesday, but we got ahead of ourselves—that’ll be coming on February 5. This is better explained by PVSC themselves, and thanks to last year’s budget the municipal digital record-keeping backend has been upgraded, so now on the new agenda pages, clicking on any item will queue up the relevant video and report documents. But if you don’t feel like clicking around the city’s council site, the TL;DR is the PVSC assesses properties based on rules laid out by the province. If you think they assessed your property value wrong, call PVSC to appeal. If you don’t like the rules PVSC has to follow in assessments, call your provincial MLA. If you don’t like the property tax rate, call your city councillor.
As it usually does, talking with PVSC got councillors curious about why we have a property tax cap, because it artificially restricts the amount of property taxes councillors can collect. Having capped properties in the mix means council has to keep raising the tax rates, in order to get increasing revenue out of property owners whose houses are increasing in value without an increasing assessment. But the cap is lifted when a property is sold, so recent, non-capped home buyers are really hurt by paying those higher rates on their full assessment. For anyone who wants to know why we have a property tax cap, last year The Coast sat down with former NS premier Darrell Dexter to let him explain himself.
1300 Oxford Street is a heritage property.
Early Childhood Interventionists Association of Nova Scotia received a less-than-market-value lease for their space at 45 Connolly Road; approximately $9,005 a year plus property taxes.
Councillors are in the final stages of filling out board appointments and committee rosters. Councillor Kathrine Morse is headed to the Canadian Urban Transit Association. Councillors Trish Purdy, Laura White and Jean St-Amand are going to the Accessibility Advisory Board. Councillors Virginia Hinch and John A. Young are headed to the African Decent Advisory Committee. And councillor Nancy Hartling joins Hinch on the Women and Gender Equity Advisory Committee. This passed on the consent agenda. All of these terms will end in November 2026, when the committee rosters will get their mid-term refresh.
The city conducted its annual resident survey, and “overall, results have trended downward from 2018, with notable decreases in perceptions of quality of life, value for taxes, overall and service-specific satisfaction, and generally with municipal performance. Residents note housing affordability and availability as the top issue facing the municipality.” Survey participation was down due to the fall’s mail strike, but still comparable to previous years. This lead to a pretty interesting debate about the survey’s methodology and usefulness. The methodology bit is because the survey respondents are predominantly white, and the sample size is a bit low and as a result the margin of error is a bit high. The usefulness bit is because everyone says they want more-efficient spending and less congestion, but they hate bike lanes. Can you trust a survey where people say they want inexpensive, efficient transportation in theory but don’t want inexpensive, efficient transportation in practice? Some councillors, like Becky Kent, pointed out that jargon might get in the way, specifically “how we language” (read: write) the survey. She might have a point.
Oh, and just one more thing about that survey.
Our smart street lights talk to our smart buses, but only if the modems are working—and they’re starting to fail. Council approved spending $769,000 to fix the modems and update the IT infrastructure. Mancini pulled this off the consent agenda to ask why we didn’t have these modems already, because we knew we needed them for our app-based fare system, which the city first started procuring in 2012. Halifax Transit told Mancini that our current modems were going to be used, but when the installs started, they found out that the modems we have aren’t good enough. The good (?) news is that they’re starting to fail anyway and need to be replaced. In follow-up questions, councillor White wanted to know how the city managed to make a $769,000 mistake. Transit staff explained that they made the plan based on the buses’ technical documents, but the hardware in the buses was different from the technical documents, and no one bothered to check that the two were actually the same until they started doing installs. Halifax Transit? Not having property inventory controls resulting in a costly mistake? What year is it, 2015?
But these new modems will allow the apps to work better *and* allow credit cards to be tapped. Soon™.
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Council approved a new Parks Lighting Strategy. This is sorely needed and a welcome addition to the municipal planning strategy roster. Unlike most of its peers, this strategic plan is likely to have an effect on municipal outcomes because councillor Sam Austin amended the motion to instruct staff to add an implementation plan. But who can say, really, why people don’t think they’re getting good value for their taxes?
Pour one out for the pickleball courts at Castle Hill, they’re being reverted to tennis courts. But there will still be a staff report about the pickleball noise from the Castle Hill courts because noise from pickleball negatively affected the residents of Castle Hill, and they’re still considering moving them. But moving the courts might negatively affect the people who use the Halifax North West Trails instead so this is not a decision that can be rushed into. First, a staff report outlining some options is needed. For context, in December, the Community Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee met and was told of potential locations where the Castle Hill pickleball courts could move. See this screenshot from the presentation:
Site A labelled on the graphic is also the site of the Halifax North West Trails Association’s new trailhead, built with volunteer labour and donations from the community. Site B is the location of their next planned trailhead, and according to the Mainland Commons Master Plan, that green bit is a Passive Recreation Reserve where only trails are allowed. The request for a staff report passed on the consent agenda because everyone wants this report.
Councillor St-Amand was going to ask for a staff report to see if volunteer firefighters should be allowed to have flashing green lights on their personal vehicles. But he pulled it from the agenda. The issue at hand is that in rural areas, there are fire stations made up of half volunteer, half professional firefighters. The professionals, waiting at the station for emergencies, have no problem making it to the fire trucks. The volunteers, waiting at home for emergencies, struggle to make it to the fire trucks at the station due to congestion. This may have some pretty serious liability risks for the city. For example, what happens if a volunteer runs a red traffic light with a flashing green dash light but hits another driver, and one of them dies? We may find out at a future date, if St-Amand brings this back to council later.
And last but not least, councillor Purdy wants to know if the city can better mitigate the pollution—noise and otherwise, caused by the operation of construction and demolition facilities that are close to people’s houses. This’ll get a staff report.
Notable Debates
Even though it may not seem like it from the staff reports submitted to council and covered in this report, council itself had very strong debate performances. All in all, the council did good governance today, but deadlines are long missed, municipal budgets keep being debated, and the Craig Blake ferry needs repairs. So, those weedy governance debates will be covered in more detail in future episodes of the Grand Parade podcast.
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Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update
Halifax Transit’s electronic fare delays demand accountability
The Grand Parade podcast: Did HRM staff try to pull a fast one on council?
Will Halifax’s city council prevent wasting another year?
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.