Something funny happened in the Halifax Forum debates. Some councillors inadvertently admitted that they have no confidence in the city’s ability to implement its large strategic plans—like the Integrated Mobility Plan or the Bus Rapid Transit plan. Want to know why? Well you’ll have to keep on reading, that information is the digestif at the end of this story. In between is everything you need to know about what happened at the Tuesday, July 11 city council meeting in the great Halifax Regional Municipality.
Things that passed
1206 Robie Street will now be a heritage property. This property used to be owned by a man named Edward Shield, who ran the Halifax Poor Asylum. When he died his executors broke up his land into smaller parcels to accommodate Halifax’s growing middle class population. The asylum was torn down and a man named John R. Richardson built what is currently there, which can be “described as a vernacular cottage with elements of various architectural styles that were popular during the mid to late 19th century, including Gothic Revival, Italianate and Classical Revival.”
Ledwidge Lumber wants to expand, and needs to change the land use bylaws to do so. The business currently sits in a rural commuter zone and the city has laws on the books to encourage forestry operations in rural commuter zones. After a public hearing, the expansion was approved.
At its last meeting, council approved moving signs around for upcoming improvements to Beechville. At this meeting, after helping a boat builder navigate the city's complex rezoning, council then approved the start of the actual amending the land use process that aims to grow and develop the community, but this time in a way that gave the historically neglected people of Beechville some agency over what their community will look like in the future.
The CFL is coming to town on July 29, and will get a flyby from the Canadian Armed Forces.
The city is changing its low-income affordable access transit plan. This is predominantly a housekeeping amendment that fixes typos and updates language, but it also allows the city to give out 70 bus passes a month to unhoused people. Councillor Sam Austin got the limit bumped up to 140, and then this legislation passed.
The city passed its micro-mobility legislation today. This means that starting next year, there should be both bikeshare and e-scooters throughout the city. Staff will be back with part B of this legislation in the near future.
The design advisory committee has been relatively useless since the completion and implementation of the Centre Plan a few years ago. This committee’s main purpose was to vet proposed developments for the Centre Plan area—but since the plan was implemented, most of the development in the area has been done as of right, and hasn’t needed to come before the committee. On top of that, the committee is having trouble meeting quorum and could inadvertently recommend changes that would go against what council (via the Centre Plan) wants to have happen in the area. As a result, this committee is being dissolved and the work it used to do is being brought in house to the city’s bureaucracy.
The city is going to be spending $11 to $16 million over the next four years for GFL to continue collecting hazardous waste until 2027.
Halifax’s marketing levy will go up slightly (from 2% to 3%) on Oct. 1 of this year. The biggest change comes from the new provincial regulations that allow the city to hit short-term rentals with this levy. The bad news for short-term rental operators and the city is that without an additional legislative change by the province, “the operator will add the marketing levy onto the purchase price of the accommodation in the operating platform, and then the levy would be paid directly to the individual operators. The operators will then need to remit this levy to HRM monthly. This process would result in a significant administrative burden for operators and municipal staff.”
The city is considering waiving some property taxes for people whose homes were destroyed by the Tantallon wildfire. An estimate for how much this will cost the city will come in a few weeks, as the Property Valuation Services Corporation can’t do the assessment until this motion passes, which it did.
Porter’s Lake Community Association had its request for funding for a tennis court denied. The city wants to give Porter’s Lake money for tennis courts, but the city gave the community association money in 2022 to fix a roof. The association took the money and fixed the roof, but didn’t do the required paperwork to prove it spent the money on fixing the roof. Staff want council to deny the community association’s second request for funding until they complete the accounting of the first round of funding. City staff are (rightly) worried that giving out public money without accounting for it would erode the trust in the community grant program, so the tennis court will have to wait until Porter’s Lake Community Association does its due diligence.
Council is considering making it slightly cheaper to become a taxi driver in the HRM. It costs $599 to become a licensed driver, but if these changes survive into second reading, then the full licensing will be $292 instead.
The province has offered to split the cost of paving J-class roads in the HRM. Staff is estimating a cost of $170,000 at the high end if the city chooses to participate in paving any class-J roads; having this agreement in place allows for cost splitting if the HRM decided to do any J-class roads over the next three years. Since 2018, the province has paved 14 J-class roads, costing taxpayers $1,611,290.31. Last year, the province only paved one under this agreement.
The HRM has started the process of making the parts of suburbs that should be transit corridors dense enough to support transit corridors. Part of the issue with council’s suburban planning is that it’s not centralized, and there are 21 plans in the HRM that govern suburban development. This is the start of what will inevitably be a years-long planning process, but this is city council starting to tackle the generational problem of decades of unsustainable suburban development.
Halifax Transit is getting its very own bylaw. Not that the laws of Canada didn’t apply on Halifax Transit buses, but there are certain things that are not illegal that really should be. Like people should not be allowed to “(iv) operate any electronic device or musical instrument producing sound through external speakers,” and this bylaw will make that a punishable offence. Here’s to hoping the city manages to implement and enforce this bylaw without falling into the same systemic enforcement issues of the rest of our legal system.
The Halifax Forum’s detailed design should be ready for tender in the near future. More on this in the notable debates section. There may be changes to parking, and this will come back to council for final approval, but as of right now the new development looks like this:
Election sign crews take notice: The unofficial sign placement wars now have official rules. For those who have no idea what that means: During an election campaign, a bunch of old guys with drills and pickup trucks run around with signs, putting them up in highly visible locations. Sign crews will often try and outdo one another on placement or creativity. But now the city has regulated where signs can go because some sign crews would find creative ways to block other party’s election signs without breaking election rules but making it hard for drivers to see at intersections.
The city is spending $52,585 to upgrade the paging system for volunteer firefighters.
Council is moving money around to clean up the Common and build the new playground that the new pool displaced.
HRM is spending $1 million to protect public transit bus drivers with those clear plastic shield/pod things for drivers.
The city is going to make rec programming more accessible by adding services for the deaf and hard of hearing.
East Preston is getting a 1.3km active transit lane from the East Preston Daycare Centre and the East Preston Recreation Centre. This will be paid for in part by the people of East Preston via area rate, as is possible due to the city’s new Administrative Order Number 2022-008-ADM Respecting the Implementation of Area Rates to Fund Sidewalks Outside of the Urban Tax Area in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Cole Harbour Place is starting to show its age, and councillor Trish Purdy wants a plan for its succession. Purdy, on a tear, also asked for a report about the feasibility of getting a transit shuttle bus out to Rainbow Haven Beach.
Councillor Pam Lovelace asked for a report on whether Halifax can meet the COP-15 biodiversity goals and sign on to the Montreal Pledge.
And finally, council got a presentation from the Halifax Partnership about Halifax’s Inclusive Economic Strategy 2022-2027 - People. Planet. Prosperity. The presenters told council that the lack of health care and housing is preventing companies from moving to Halifax. The chamber highlighted the “positive” news that companies were starting to build their own housing for their workers since there wasn’t enough housing. Slowly but surely, company towns are starting to make a comeback. Pretty neat.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the above presentation was given by the Halifax Chamber of Commerce. Details about the East Preston active transit lane have also been corrected.
Notable debates
In the affordable transit debates, Austin pushed back against the upper limit of 70 passes for unhoused people and asked why the limit existed. Staff told Austin this was in the bylaw so councillors would have an idea of the size of the program. This doesn’t really make sense for a bunch of reasons. As Austin learned, having an exact number written into the bylaw hamstrings council's ability to help the city's unhoused population, should the need exceed the legislated maximum of passes. Austin asked if raising the number of passes to 1,000 would be a substantive change to the legislation, and city lawyer John Traves said yes, it would be. Then CAO Cathie O’Toole asked staff if changing the number of passes from 70 to 140 would change anything on staff’s back end, and staff said that no, changing the number of passes doesn’t change the accountability mechanism for public funds—so whether it’s 70 or 140, it’s the same to them.
In this debate, councillor Lovelace also asked how many students use the transit pass that comes with their tuition, and city staff said they don’t know because there is no way for them to track that information. Until some form of electronic payment for buses wills itself into existence in the HRM, the same will be true for the usage of the affordable pass. It is unclear what Traves found substantive about the proposed number change, with no other changes to the policy. It is also very weird that the estimates for the program were written into the legislation itself, as this should have been in the presentation to council. Then council could have decided to create an arbitrary ceiling, if they wanted to.
The Forum debate was a poor showing from suburban-y rural-y coucillors like Becky Kent and Lovelace. The two argued that their communities don’t have something like the Forum (which is true). They then argued that since their communities have to rely on the Forum, and since transit is crap, the Forum must have more parking. The chair of the Halifax Forum Community Association, Paul Card, also told council the Forum needed more parking, because sometimes there are three events held there at once.
Although Card may read municipal planning strategies in his spare time, both Kent and Lovelace have to in the course of their job. They should know the city’s plans to improve transit with the Bus Rapid Transit plan, they should know the city’s climate goals, they should know the city’s Integrated Mobility Plan goals. For those suburban councillors to then advocate for a lot of extra parking for a building that is supposed to last 50 years or more is essentially an admission that they have no faith in their ability to change our modes of transportation and meet their own planning goals. Luckily, the CAO intervened to tell councillors they could delay the parking debate until a later meeting, giving people ample time to write to their councillors demanding better transportation options—not more parking—at the Forum.Council also spent a lot of time talking about the suburban plan and rapid transit corridors. A lot of this debate was city staff reassuring councillors that they were, in fact, thinking about the larger suburban and growth issues. Councillor Waye Mason pointed out that many of the questions asked by his peers have already been answered in other large regional plans that council has already debated at length, as recently as last meeting.
