Halifax libraries budget shows city working against itself on parking

The regular season of HRM’s budget debates ended on Feb 26, with a slew of routine budget presentations from HRM’s public libraries, the municipal auditor general, the city’s corporate service business units and the fiscal services business unit. Here’s how that meeting of the city’s Budget Committee—a group whose membership is all of council—went down.

Halifax Public Libraries is the business unit that regularly gives chief Ken Steubing over at Halifax Fire competition for the municipal department with the most depressing budget. HPL’s Åsa Kachan told the committee that libraries are currently at a “saturation point” thanks to Halifax’s growth, and can’t easily handle all of the city’s new residents with its existing facilities. On top of the challenges of growth come the challenges of maintaining the status quo, because the city’s existing libraries need repairs. The Halifax North Memorial Public Library renovations are just starting to get underway because last year the city prioritized the Kenshen Goodman Library with its limited budget.

Jeff Bezos’s monopoly on books means the city needs to spend more money every year on maintaining its collection, which is an additional $290,800 this year. The city used to charge a fee to Haligonians who held on to these books a bit longer than they should have, but the librarians figured out that charging people late fees meant people stopped coming to the library due to owing those fees. And when people stop going to the library, society gets worse. In 2020 the librarians determined that ensuring people kept coming to the library was far more valuable to the city than the ~$200,000 a year they collected in shaming fees, and council hasn’t and isn’t inclined to reverse that decision.

Speaking of fees, Libraries expects a lower amount from parking fees than they used to get at the Spring Garden location due to the availability of street parking in the nearby Spring Garden Road area. According to the available municipal parking data, zone C, the parking zone around the Central Library, was the fullest it’s ever been on Dec 18, 2024, at 5:58 pm when only 15 of zone C’s 161 spots were available to rent. However, more often than not, even when zone C is most busy in the late afternoons, there are usually over 60 spots available to rent.

This means that, in practice, since the library will be short this year by $3.3 million, that money will need to be paid for with taxes, and the hit to the tax rate won’t be offset as much by parking fees like it was in previous years. This is not to say that Halifax should not have given its employees a raise after a strike and a new collective agreement was signed. But if Halifax cared about keeping taxes low for Haligonians, Halifax would not undercut itself to keep parking fees and municipal revenues artificially low.

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Librarians went on strike this week against a city that doesn’t follow its own labour policies.

The rest of the corporate services budgets were passed with little debate. Fiscal Services, the business unit that collects all the money on behalf of the HRM, collected $902 million in fees and taxes. After $42 million in debt payments, $170.4 million in bill payments, and moving money to fund various municipal projects, Fiscal Services collected $689,946,700 in revenues this year.

The Chief Administrative Officer’s office’s budget ($16,604,700), the Finance and Asset Management budget ($18,321,600), the Human Resources budget ($11,641,300), the city’s IT department budget ($45,038,200) and the Legal department budget ($11,214,800) were all approved.

During the debate about the Legal Department budget, councillor Trish Purdy asked top city lawyer John Traves what was causing a 20% spike in costs in his department. This spike is not (thankfully) a spike in costs; it’s a 20% spike in being sued. But this question did allow Traves “To sort of blow our horn a little bit. You know, we run a full insurance shop.” In simple terms, this means that before Halifax had this shop in-house, a spike in litigation may have also come with an associated spike in costs. However, since the city can and does adjudicate its own insurance claims under $200,000, it saves a ton of money on insurance rates.

Traves’ legal department joins Parks and Rec’s lawn mowing budget and a few other municipal services that have been brought in-house, achieving better municipal services at lower costs to taxpayers.

Last but not least, Halifax’s Office of the Auditor General got their $1,342,200 budget approved by council. Halifax’s AG, Andrew Atherton, has some concerns about the city’s ability to implement his office’s suggestions. He noted in his presentation that only 7 of 19 of his office’s outstanding recommendations have been completed, and that he is “quite concerned” with the city’s completion rate when implementing auditor recommendations. He told councillors that “it lands back to all of you, Audit and Finance [Committee] and all of you as councillors, to push management.”

Management, for their part, reassured councillors that they were working on implementing the AG’s recommendations, and that business units are adding the people needed to the bureaucracy to fix the issues identified in various audits.

  As the meeting was about to end most uneventfully, our city’s new mayor threw a spanner into the works. Andy Fillmore apologized to his peers for moving such a large motion at the tail end of the debates without giving all of them a heads up, but he thought there would be more budget meetings. Fillmore then put a motion on the floor proposing to slash $20 million in funding from various municipal programs and services. Twist!

The committee had a split reaction to this motion, with some councillors, like Sam Austin, taking issue with the proposed cuts to HalifACT, Halifax’s flagship climate plan, and council split these service cuts into separate motions. During a brief debate, many of our councillors praised Fillmore for his leadership, before sending $20 million in service cuts to the Budget Adjustment List debates.

A lot of these service cuts were first identified by staff in the budget introduction debate way back in Feb 5, where they advised, “while these adjustments would reduce revenue requirements, staff do not recommend them as they are not sustainable solutions and may negatively impact the municipality’s future financial health.”

For more on Fillmore’s unsustainable solutions that may negatively impact the city’s future health, stay tuned to The Coast’s budget season coverage and the upcoming preview of the budget playoffs (the Budget Adjustment List debate) scheduled for March 19.

This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.