Halifax’s budget season is in the break between the normal budget debates and the budget playoffs (the Budget Adjustment List debates), so council got back to normal business this week in a relatively quick city council meeting. So without further ado, here’s what happened at the Tuesday, March 19 council meeting.
Things that passed
The military will do a flypast of the Highway of Heroes on August 17, 2024.
Halifax Water presented their business plan to council. Their capital costs are going up as a lot of big pieces of infrastructure come up for renewal. The report from Halifax Water says they are excited about their new headquarters, but the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board says the pricetag is excessive. This presentation led to a prolonged conversation about water infrastructure, which is covered in the notable debates section below.
Someone wants to build a single family home on Greenbank Court in Dartmouth, this’ll get a public hearing.
Deputy mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon, councillor Kathryn Morse and councillor Pam Lovelace will become the HRM’s representatives on the Canadian Capital Cities Orginization until the fall election.
The city was going to request that the province adopt the new 2020 federal building codes, which are crucial for the city’s efforts to prevent climate change and destruction from wildfires, but this was deleted from the agenda.
The administrative motions to run the fall CSAP and municipal elections have passed and democracy prevails in the HRM.
The Heritage Advisory Committee proposed that 1641 Fairfield Road be added to the list of heritage properties and that 12 York Reboubt Cresent be removed as a heritage property and that 1259 Park Street to be demolished. The city’s going to help pay for maintenance on 12 heritage properties, and deny two houses for reasons of “procedural fairness.” As council was considering these motions at the top of the meeting the 1259 Park street demolition motion was pulled off the consent agenda due procedural issues. After a quick debate, it’ll now report to figure out some things like can a cemetery be rezoned into a community facility?
Councillor Lisa Blackburn will be asking for a report about the status of the flood damage from the floods of July 2023. This motion garnered a lot of debate, with councillor Lovelace pointing out the obvious that council shouldn’t have to ask for reports from staff following up on major crisis situations. Lovelace said that this type of follow-up reporting “should be part of the work that staff does to provide an update to council on these crisis situations.”
Lovelace wants to make sure that when pedestrians are bleeding out in crosswalks because we built a transportation network around the toys of rich white men on stolen land, at least that blood will be spilling onto crosswalks painted with Indigenous designs.
The two Middle Sackville councillors, Blackburn and Lovelace, also asked for staff to expedite the master planning process for the Middle Sackville area. This will get a staff report and was the subject of some debate. This report could get spicy if staff game out how to test the new provincialy regulated fee freezes that came when premier Tim Houston’s Tories passed Bill 329.
Lovelace is still on her stormwater management tear and is going to ask for a report from the CAO to get a comprehensive stormwater management plan for the municipality.
Councillor Patty Cuttell wants to know if the city can backstop Tim Houston’s failures on climate and is asking for a report on existing or planned municipal legislation that will help protect HRM’s coastlines.
Notable Debates
Halifax Water’s presentation covered a lot of ground and a lot more came up when councillors asked questions. Those questions spanned a whole range of topics from population growth to expanding water service boundaries, but one of the things that came up a lot was the impact of climate change and population growth on the different ends of Halifax’s water management. In the stormwater side of the house, as the earth continues on this heating trend because humans absolutely refuse to stop frying our life support systems, one of the consequences for Halifax will be an increase in rainfall year over year.
Since it is likely that we will be getting more rainfall-turned-floods like we did in 2023, Halifax Water needs to upgrade its capacity to deal with stormwater runoff. As culverts hit capacity in large rain storms, compounded by factors like roads not absorbing water, there’s been an increase in overland flooding. Which has led to costly damages to our infrastructure, and we’ll start to get an idea of just how bad it is when councillor Blackburn’s motion on flood damage comes back to council.
Not much of a debate really all things considered, just yet another highlight of one of the many ways average tax payers are left holding the bag as large corporations bank huge profits off our labour while they also run roughshod over our standard of living and spineless politicians.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2024.
