After a four-hour closed-door meeting, Halifax council Tuesday voted unanimously to hire Richard Butts as the city’s new chief administrative officer. Butts is presently a deputy city manager in Toronto. He will start work in Halifax City Hall March 28. Breaking with past practice of contracting for the job with former CAOs Dan English and George McLellan, Butts will be a direct employee of the city; he starts at an annual salary of $285,000, increased to $300,000 after one year. Should Butts quit on his own accord or be fired “with cause,” he will receive no severance package, but should he be fired “without cause” he will receive 18 months’ pay, says mayor Peter Kelly.
Butts started his career in garbage management, working for first Laidlaw Waste Systems and then as a VP at Waste Management. In 1998 he was hired by the city of Toronto and worked first to develop a contract to haul garbage to Michigan, and then later to site a new landfill in Ontario. He moved quickly up the city bureaucracy, and by 2007 was one of three deputy city managers.
The announcement that Butts has been hired in Halifax came just one day after one of the other three deputy city managers also left city employment. Speculation in Toronto media is that there is a mass exodus of senior bureaucrats in reaction to the recent election of mayor Rob Ford, who is making deep cuts in the city budget. But Butts says Ford played no role in his move to Halifax.
“I’ve worked with mayor Ford for 10 years now and always had a terrific relationship with him,” Butts tells The Coast. “I anticipated that would continue. This [Halifax] opportunity came up in the fall before the mayor was even the mayor—I began to pursue it then, because I had been thinking about an opportunity to help lead a city, and sometimes you don’t get to choose when opportunity knocks. I’m at the right age, and Halifax is the right city. But factually, this started before mayor Ford was even mayor Ford.”
The 52-year-old Butts says he anticipates being Halifax’s top bureaucrat “for quite a while.”
ENVAC garbage system
There are two major controversies associated with Butts’ career, both involving development of land in Toronto’s Don Valley. The first was a 2008 proposal to install a cutting-edge vacuum garbage collection system in the West Don Lands precinct. Such systems, now used in Scandinavia, are said to increase garbage diversion rates by better separating organics and recyclables, and to decrease greenhouse gas emissions related to garbage collection because far fewer trucks are needed on the streets. The Swedish firm ENVAC had hoped to set up a pilot project in Toronto to begin cracking the North American market. Butts, however, recommended that the city not participate in the project, effectively killing it.
“City staff prefers not to own and operate a vacuum waste system as this would be inconsistent with our current practise whereby all waste management equipment and systems at multi-unit buildings are privately owned and maintained,” wrote Butts in his recommendation.
But a source familiar with the issue, who asked not to be named because he still has to deal with Toronto’s city bureaucracy, has a less charitable spin on the situation. “Richard Butts stopped it because he didn’t want to deal with the issue of retraining the garbage truck drivers and the labour issues that that would raise.”
After Toronto passed on the deal, the city of Montreal jumped at the opportunity to install the system, which will begin operating next year.
Port Land Arena
The second and more publicized controversy in Butts’ Toronto career involved the development of the Lower Don Lands. A Waterfront Design Review Panel wanted the area to be densely developed with a mixed-use neighbourhood centered around transit.
But, under Butts’ guidance, the city wanted to place the proposed Port Land Arena at the site. The cheapest and simplest way to build the arena was to take a typical suburban four-pad arena design, a one-storey building with an adjacent expansive 450-car surface parking lot, and plop it onto the property.
The design panel wasn’t necessarily opposed to an arena, but wanted it to conform to the dense character of the proposed development—that is, they wanted the arena built on four levels and without the parking lot.
“It was clear from the onset that [the design panel’s preference] would be more expensive than the traditional suburban model,” says Butts. “It came up to twice the price—a four-pad rink costs in the range of $40 to $50 million; this one was in the range of $80-$90 million.”
As for parking, “hockey is a commuter sport, it’s not a transit sport,” says Butts.
As the controversy unfolded, world renowned architect Ken Greenberg, who was on the design panel, abruptly quit his position in protest, because “the sports proposal would essentially render the [Lower Don] plan useless,” wrote Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume.
The Port Lands Arena project now sits in limbo, as Toronto city council weighs whether to build it at all.
The suburban-model arena gutted the dense neighbourhood design, agrees The Coast’s source. “They were going to sacrifice 16 acres of extremely valuable land, several million square feet of development on the waterfront, and a project that has been cited as one of the 16 leading climate change projects in the world—none of which [Butts] cared about. And the economics are the land values they were sacrificing were much greater than the capital costs [of the more expensive arena design].”
HRM By Design
The Port Land Arena controversy raises the question: How supportive will Butts be for Halifax’s downtown planning initiative, HRM By Design, which like the Lower Don Lands plan hopes to build a dense, mixed-use, transit-oriented downtown?
“I’ve read about HRM By Design, but I don’t know much about the details,” says Butts. “I don’t think it’s fair for me to comment on things about Halifax with only half information. I’m really excited to get down there and learn a lot more and hopefully bring some value to those discussions, but I really don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
Butts will, however, reside in a downtown apartment.
“What’d I’d be watching out for with Butts,” says the person familiar with Butts’ career in Toronto, “is that he seems to be someone who just wasn’t into innovation, sustainability, creativity—it was very much business as usual, bottom line, limited thinking.”
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2011.
Good to know this article is entirely based on some unnamed source’s opinion. Once again Tim, great journalism. Can’t tell one bit that you’ve already formed your own opinion on this guy, and he’s barely started work yet. Maybe he isn’t creative or innovative, but getting us to believe that because of some weak argument about a garbage collection system (and someone’s assumptions about it), as well as an overpriced arena which I think anyone would oppose, don’t add up in my mind. Give the man a chance or at least find some real evidence that he is who you say he is.
HRM hires former garbage man.
Seems about right.
All we have to do is trash Kelly and a few councillors and the world will be fine once again.
Great, another unelected, unaccountable money man. Only in Nova Scotia.
I’m starting a pool on when the other HRM bureaucrats who report to this guy start to get big raises in the name of “internal equity” in order to keep up with Butts’ ridiculously huge salary. The over/under is 6 months before the taxpayers take it on the chin for raises for the likes of Anstey and Lebreque.
Within 12 months HRM will need a new Police Chief and council has to undergo a rigorous selection process spelled out in legislation.
They will need a large pot of cash, the bar has been set a whole lot higher.
Good an experienced leader from away, sometimes we need the experience of being from away. Keep on, Chas.
This is a bad hire. With budget deficits and mismanaged projects etc. what HRM needed was a new CAO who had a track record as change agent not another lifetime municipal bureaucrat. This hire will result in business as usual at HRM city hall, a real value add CAO hire would have been a personality who can stand up to some of the goofballs currently on council as well as shaking up sleeping city staff. What hss been hired is a council yes-man. Reid says it is too soon to say this and to give him a chance, I do not think so, look at his colourless insignificant track record, if anything has changed in 2 years I will eat my hat. Here’s the plan, in 2013 after we elect some councillors with some brains and guts, package off Butts and hire a real leader for CAO.
Once again, Bousquet takes the lead in journalism’s race to the bottom. Instead of focusing on the real issues, his approach is to find whatever ‘dirt’ he can on someone. Attacking the person, instead of the issue.
All that said, I am very upset with HRM’s decision to hire this man. It has nothing to do with him personally or professionally. I’m sure he’s quite capable, and (now that the deal is done) I hope he brings some positive change to Halifax.
The problem I have is this. I work with a lot of companies across Nova Scotia. These companies sometimes hire people. And when they do, they usually have a pretty strict budget that they need to stick to. And if they go to market, and discover that they can’t get the ‘top talent’ that they were looking for, at the salary range they were hoping to pay, they have a decision to make. And I can guarantee this: NONE of them have the option of making the decision to increase their projected salary range by half.
Put simply: if they can’t hire what they THOUGHT they wanted at what they can pay, they have to revise their qualifications.
HRM, on the other hand, apparently faces no such limitations. They went to the market expecting to hire someone for about the same as Mr. English was making ($190K … already, in my opinion, more than HRM should pay for this role). They discovered that they couldn’t get what they wanted at that rate. And instead of going back to the drawing board and asking what they COULD get for $190K, they immediately increased their range by almost 50% ($200K + $100K = $300K). And they are able to do this ONLY because – unlike our struggling private sector – they have the seemingly bottomless well of tax dollars to draw upon.
Again, (and unlike Mr. Bousquet) I have no doubt that in Toronto, or another major city, Mr. Butts would be fairly paid at $300K. But we are not a major city. We are a city of less that half-a-million people, in a province with less than a million. We cannot afford – and SHOULD NOT afford – the best-of-the-best from anywhere. We should be hiring, and paying for, people that are the best fit within what we can reasonably afford as a small city.
Quoted from the article:
“The suburban-model arena gutted the dense neighbourhood design, agrees The Coast’s source. “They were going to sacrifice 16 acres of extremely valuable land, several million square feet of development on the waterfront, and a project that has been cited as one of the 16 leading climate change projects in the world—none of which [Butts] cared about. And the economics are the land values they were sacrificing were much greater than the capital costs [of the more expensive arena design].”
Question is, would ANY public official appointed today to one of these positions have the moral fortitude and the futuristic vision to do something with valuable land other than profit off it by building the latest multi-million dollar or office complex? I highly doubt it. My skepticism of commenters on here (those like Growingcity and others, for example) mounts when I hear blanket calls for hiring cheap labor to fill these roles while yet expecting impressive results from the mediocre talent thus hired. Is the motivation for booting out the current mayor and certain councillors largely coming from, oh I don’t know, MAKING MORE MONEY AND PROFIT off land development in the city, rather than encouraging useful public projects like the skating oval and the new public library and a total overhaul of our uselessly inefficient transit system, that ALL can use? I would need some proof that it’s otherwise. Remember, if our present mayor gets booted, the current deputy mayor fills in until an election is held, and would THAT represent progress? (stifles a giggle). The only recent councillor who demonstrated any kind of backbone and social vision- Howard Epstein– is now a provincial cabinet minister, so I don’t see any hope of things getting any better.
Just wanted to put in a personal comment that if you think Butts is a push-over or a ‘yes man’ I suggest meeting him in person. As a man who went back to university at the age of 50 to gain more experience in his field, I have nothing but respect for him. I suggest watching him closely before making judgments.
I am a graduate student and had the chance to have Richard Butts as a colleague. He is an idea person but mostly an action oriented person. Always willing to listen to others and with a keen interest for making things happen. I think he will be very successful in his new role. You will see a no-nonsense, passionate CAO.
We have now had a full four years of Richard “The Slasher” Butts and I have to finally concede that he really and truly is without vision and apparently has completely misunderstood his mandate. Obviously “going back to university at the age of 50” has only served to increase his remuneration package but has done nothing for his comprehension. Perhaps there is no one at City Hall who has the wherewithal to reign him in and make sure he does do his job and that job is quite simply to look after the needs of the citizens of HRM. Like so many speculators who have flocked to Nova Scotia in the past few years I suspect that he came for the salary and the advancement and not so much for the lobster. All I see is a shabbier, dirtier city with a decrepit downtown core and increasing legions of disgruntled citizens. I am deeply embarrassed each year when visitors come to Halifax. Library? Pffft! I say cut Mr. Butts loose, pay him off and drive him to our beautiful airport and say goodbye. And to all those councilors at City Hall who will only tow the line we could use the Metro X bus and you can all join him.