On Wednesday Jan. 24, the city’s Budget Committee met for its inaugural meeting of the 2024 Budget Season. In this meeting, councillor Sam Austin got a more fulsome explanation about the hard work the Department of Public Works is doing to ensure that history will not be kind to this cohort of councillors. The DPW’s implementation of an evaluation metric called “value engineering" is being used to justify causing the climate emergency, congestion, road injuries and road deaths. And worse than all of that, the Department of Public Works is also using value engineering to save money due to the unsustainable maintenance burden of DPW’s roads, which are slowly but surely bankrupting the city. But before council could start talking about how exactly value engineering is eviscerating the longterm health of the city, the Budget Committee needed to do some admin.
First up was the public hearing section of the debate. Speaking of systemic mistakes, council got a presentation from Deny Sullivan, a local writer who writes about housing and the economy. He told council that due to inflation, the property value cap and council’s insistence on keeping taxes low, most homeowners in the HRM have a lower tax burden now than they did in 2019. At a minimum, this annual decision to keep tax rates low by council combines with the provincial property tax cap to give people a double tax break. This double tax break has cost the city—at a minimum—about $20 million annually.
As the budget debate progressed, councillors learned that a favourite media statistic—the average tax bill increase—is a largely unhelpful stat for people who want information about their tax bill. Because when places like Saltwire report that the tax increase staff is proposing to council means the average tax bill may go up by $205, this is incredibly misleading information. Mainly because most of the houses in the HRM won’t see an increase of $205, because most houses in the HRM have a capped value that is less than the average of $320,000. The reason most houses will see an annual increase of less than $205 per year would be evident to anyone watching chief financial officer Jerry Blackwood’s presentation, because he put up this graph which shows that over half of single family homes will see not see a $205 increase, even at the current, proposed, hike.
After the committee finished their admin, they got into the meat of discussing the city’s planned capital projects, a full list of which can be found here. Councillors hammered staff representatives from the Department of Public Works for consistently and thoroughly shitting the bed on being able to do some pretty basic on-the-job performance requirements, like implementing the will of council as instructed.
At the forefront of Tuesday’s debate was the Macdonald Bridge bike connection that has been promised for a decade (!!) since Jan. 28, 2014. It took a year for DPW to come back with an initial plan; in 2015 the department, then led by Ken Reashor, proposed a $2 million flyover bridge bike connection, an elevated ramp to guide bikes between North Street and the bridge while avoiding the worst of the hill. The city hired consultants, and work began.
In 2017, council passed a motion approving tenders of the flyover lane even as the cost estimate had more than doubled and now found itself in the $5-7 million price range. Instead of just building the damn thing, the city again hired another consultant to do more planning. That planning resulted in mission creep, more design elements and, of course, a higher cost to HRM taxpayers as the city found it had a “lack of understanding of the full scope of the work.” This pushed the price up yet again—to $12 million dollars—and now the city needed other orders of government to pitch in because the new cost of the project was six times more money than the city initially expected.
This $12 million price tag is landing in the HRM’s lap at a pivotal moment in human history, and at a pivotal moment in Halifax’s history. As a species we need to decide, relatively quickly, whether or not we want our children to have a habitable planet. And “relatively quickly” here means a whole lot faster than city council’s glacial pace. The Earth is set to blast through the 2030-projected climate tipping point of 1.5 degrees of warming six years early in 2024, and while council has dithered away a decade on a bike ramp, Department of Public Works seems hard at work doing everything it can to prevent Haligonians from leaving a habitable planet for their children.
Because while it may be true in theory that DPW cares about Halifax’s strategic plans, about the climate emergency and about becoming a cycling city come hell or high water, judging by actual on-the-ground outcomes the department’s clear priorities are saving money and moving cars. In order to do this, DPW relies on value engineering. The only problem with value engineering is that it’s a garbage in, garbage out system. If DPW pumps it full of garbage, it’ll spew out garbage. And the department keeps pumping it full of garbage.
Let’s take the Windsor Street Exchange redesign for example. In 2019, councillor Waye Mason said there was an opportunity to put active transportation in the Windsor Exchange when it was redeveloped. But in 2023 when it came back to council, active transportation was nowhere to be found. At Wednesday’s budget meeting we learned that DPW used value engineering to come up with different “solutions” for the Windsor Street Exchange.
Value engineering came up a lot when councillor Sam Austin pressed current DPW head Brad Anguish on his department’s delayed delivery of council’s priorities. But DPW doesn’t care about council priorities; they only care that if they spend money, they spend the least amount possible. Actual outcomes for Haligonians? Council’s strategic priorities? Evidence? Nah, fuck all of that.
Here’s the DPW’s current No Name brand plans to get bike riders to and from Macdonald Bridge:
To make the bridge better for cyclists, value engineering has had a lot to say. The above plan shows an overhead view of North Street between the bridge, at right, and Gottingen Street on the left. Most of the changes drawn in red are for buses, but bikes are dealt with where the road curls around coming off the bridge. Instead of a flyover ramp lifting bikes away from both the traffic and the daunting hill, bike riders will instead cross four lanes of car traffic as this detail with added routing arrows shows:
It is fair to wonder, after seeing this design that’s worse than what currently exists, how DPW thinks spending $6 million on this bullshit is exciting. The reason is quite simple. It’s value engineering. According to a city spokesperson, “as part of the value engineering process, we evaluate various design options to achieve functionality, quality and performance. When conducting a value engineering study that compares design options, the focus is on optimizing the design, rather than comparing it to existing conditions.” In other words, value engineering only measures the parameters you give it, and in this case they did not use it to compare their “solutions” to existing infrastructure.
DPW decided this was the best solution only because it’s the cheapest of five options that value engineering considered. The “Base Case” on the following chart of these options isn’t the status quo of leaving the bridge and its imperfect bike lane alone, it’s the flyover ramp with a price tag that’s now gone from $12 million to $15.8 million. Value engineering is being told to do something that costs less than $15.8 million; it isn’t allowed to consider if doing nothing is better.
DPW did not evaluate the “At Grade” scenario against existing infrastructure, which is a problem. Using only evidence available in the Integrated Mobility Plan and Safe Streets Framework, we already know it's only a matter of time until the proposed design will kill a bike rider. This plan puts bike riders in more conflict with traffic and in more danger at intersections. We know this because in 2018 when the HRM did the research for the safe streets framework, that’s what they found.
They made some charts.
They made an infographic.
And keeping cyclists safe was supposed to be the whole point of the project according to staff in 2017, who wrote this “project is not addressing any specific safety issue. Rather it is creating dedicated space for bicycling.” This is needed because “those going to, and arriving from all other parts of the peninsula and beyond…are required to contend with high traffic volumes, busy intersections and steep grades,” as the Macdonald Bridge Bikeway Connectors Project staff report told council about bikes and the bridge in 2017. But this means the Department of Public Works is ignoring the main goals of the project and is planning to make a bike network more dangerous because they can save $4-10 million to get rid of a steep grade. Good job team! High fives all around!
In no world is spending $6 million dollars to make things worse good value for money, and yet this is the recommendation for Halifax thanks to value engineering. You’d think it would be both easy and necessary to plug existing infrastructure conditions into the value engineering framework, to make sure any money spent is actually an improvement. But that’s not how DPW rolls.
Another big issue with value engineering is that in order for it to work well, all of the criteria need to be well defined, and if well defined, consistently applied in line with municipal strategies. If not, it’s easy to game the formula to make it “prove” any desired solution is good value for money. In the above “Scenario Evaluation Summary” chart where staff compared several options, a wall of lists, data and seemingly arbitrary score multiplier weights conspires to mysteriously rank the “At Grade” plan above the highest-scoring choice, a bridge called “Short Lorne.”
And this evaluation also relies on other municipal guides and policies working flawlessly but without scrutiny. For example, the city has a Multi-Modal Level Of Service (MMLOS) framework that it should be using to evaluate things like this Macdonald Bridge project. Unfortunately Halifax’s MMLOS uses standards “established by the American Highway Capacity Manual” and not the HRM’s strategic plans as directed by council. Whoops. This in turn means that HRM planning has weird quirks. For example, did you know that when planning an intersection in the HRM, it’s better to delay a bus than a car according to the MMLOS framework, even though municipal strategic plans say the reverse?
All of these issues are, admittedly, relatively minor on their own; but they regularly and repeatedly combine to create outcomes that kill people. This is a known problem, with known solutions, but in Halifax this lethal problem is fine with the DPW, and council, as long as our population keeps growing to mask the increased instances of violence.
The final issue with value engineering as implemented in the HRM is that it is actively preventing Halifax from decarbonizing its transportation network. On Jan. 9, 2024, council heard its annual update on the HalifACT climate action plan, and it turns out we are failing in our response to climate change. Right now, even though HalifACT has been worked on for over five years, we have yet to complete even one quarter of our goals. At that Jan. 9 meeting, staff told council that the city’s bureaucracy was doing everything it can, but it’s being held up by other orders of government, or things outside of their control like supply chains. Things like that, things outside of the city's control, those things are what is holding the city back from implementing our ambitious HalifACT goals.
One of the things that will be crucial for Halifax to meet its stated goals is get everyone driving in electric vehicles, or out of their cars and taking the bus, a bike, rolling or walking instead. These goals are supported by and entrenched in HalifACT and the IMP respectively.
Right now, the city’s value engineering process only measures how well automotive infrastructure lines up with municipal priorities, even though automotive infrastructure itself doesn't line up with council’s priorities. Our strategic plans say we want to break free of our automotive transportation monopoly. We want to stop subsidizing the environmental, social and fiscal damage caused by cars. And yet, in spite of that, the DPW can't even come up with a low-car or no-car solution to plug into the value engineering framework to act as a “strategic plan baseline” measurement.
Here’s an at-grade solution for the Macdonald Bridge that does not involve cars. It’s a design made up by me asking “hey could we just use the bridge that exists but without cars and achieve all our goals for no money?” And that answer is more or less yes we could—physically. If the city were truly ambitious about its climate goals, this would be accompanied with a plan to filter car traffic out of the north end and downtown Dartmouth, and start re-creating complete communities like council keeps threatening to do. The green is a bike lane, and the red lanes are for transit. (Thanks to Kevin Wilson over at HFX By Bike for the graphic.)
The Coast asked the city if it would be up for this plan, and the response was the familiar shuffle of responsibility between the city and province: “the bridges are owned by Halifax Harbour Bridges, a crown corporation. The proposal you have attached would require the closure of all traffic lanes on the bridge to personal vehicles, which is a decision beyond the municipality's scope. As such, we did not consider this option.” While it is true that the provincially accountable Halifax Harbour Bridges likely would not go for such a plan (even just mentioning this hypothetical to a HHB spokesperson was enough to hear anxiety noticeably spike in his voice), it's worth pointing out here that being outside of the municipality’s scope rarely, if ever, prevents councillors from asking the province for changes they want.
But more importantly, HHB (likely) not being game to save the planet's failing life support systems does not explain why the DPW was unable to include a solution like this in their value engineering framework, which would allow the department to better compare their proposed solutions to council’s stated priorities. That way, at the very least, we would also have an idea how much of a compromise we are making between our stated ideals and what we can actually, physically, achieve. On top of that, a solution like this (with no cars and using already existing infrastructure) should come out on top of any HRM-specific implementation or use of a value engineering analysis. If it does not, we know the analysis metrics are broken and in need of adjustment. In this way, we could also use value engineering to update our assumptions, our information and our plans. And then our plans would be based on what we can actually, realistically, achieve. This would allow us to collect (and hopefully use) the information we need to correct the mistakes we are making—the mistakes that have us on track to cook our children alive on a super-heated planet in the relatively near future.
All of this conversation about value engineering and other broken municipal processes featured heavily in the capital budget debate, because even though completing the AAA network will cost about $46.9 million (approximately 4% of HRM’s $1.2 billion annual budget) we won’t be able to complete it this year. Historically we have only spent $3.2 million (0.27%) annually on this “come hell or highwater” priority of council. So we will have to wait until 2028 to start seriously decarbonizing transportation—almost a decade after declaring a climate emergency—four years after we blow past the 1.5 degree deadline—then and only then is when the city will start taking decarbonizing transportation seriously.
On Jan. 9, the people of Halifax heard that our municipal bureaucracy was doing everything it could to mitigate the worst of the ongoing climate emergency. On Jan. 24, we found out that was a lie because it turns out the Department of Public Works can’t even incorporate some pretty basic climate-mitigation calculations into one of their key decision-making frameworks.
Just in case it seems like this is all on the DPW, let’s be clear that council bears responsibility here too. They should see that this process isn’t working and demand changes. But perhaps that’s expecting too much from our elected officials. Because also at this Jan. 24 meeting, DPW’s Brad Anguish told councillors the city is wasting $3 million a year on speed humps, and DPW can’t stop building them—can’t stop wasting that money—unless directed by council. Anguish asked council to direct him to stop building speed humps, and to do it fast because money is going out the door really soon.
Budget Committee passed the $309,236,000 capital budget. Councillor Trish Purdy broke the budget motions apart so she could vote against some of them; Purdy cast the only nay votes of the day. There was no motion about speed hump spending.
The first budget debate of 2024 is done and dusted, and it was a disappointing, at times abysmal, start to this year’s budget season. The good news is that even though the capital budget is a lot of money, and does have the advance tender meeting which allows the city to start spending some money early, this budget is not final until ratified at the end of April.
The absolute dumpster fire of a Macdonald Bridge design is also not yet finalized. Based on councillors Waye Mason and Sam Austin’s grilling of Brad Anguish (and hopefully an update to HRM’s value engineering processes), it is likely the design will change (and hopefully quite drastically). There are also signs of a council becoming aware of the unfair burden they have been saddled with carrying. In Nova Scotia’s cities, mayors do not wield special executive or legislative power; instead they often play the role of consensus builder, to give tangible direction and outcomes to the will of council. In previous years, our mayor was talking about keeping the tax rate low. This year he’s talking about diversifying HRM’s revenue streams and trying to correct unsustainable development patterns.
The bureaucracy too, is showing signs of change, some of it quite drastic. We are in a housing crisis, and unlike the response to the climate emergency, the city is now reacting like it’s an emergency. For the promise of $79 million from the feds (~0.06% of this year’s budget), the HRM immediately and drastically corrected decades of bad planning and changed zoning bylaws overnight. Although overnight for the city means these corrections are probably going to happen within a year. The city itself will not change overnight, because that’s not how bylaw changes manifest in the real world. But as things naturally get redeveloped, the city should become a better place to live as new development is guided by new plans and new priorities.
The city’s bureaucracy is also starting to become more adaptable with new practices like annual policy reviews to make sure the bylaws on the books are working like they’re supposed to. Next year the city will be switching to a new council-term-length budget cycle; also next year multiple key strategic plans will be back for their five-year renewals. These come at a time when some of the “effective financial and operational management and delivering results” stuff we hired the new CAO to implement in HRM is starting to become noticeable in bureaucratic processes.
As this budget season rolls on, councillors will be asked to make key decisions about the future of this city, and in spite of a bad performance at this budget meeting, this city is showing real signs of modernizing. As this budget season rolls on, it’s important for you to read about the changes planned for the city. As unpopular as the changes seem today, in the future it will feel insane that we did not make the changes sooner. We forget that doing something dumb, dangerous and normal is really hard to change.
Even though we all understand the value of seatbelts today, when they were first introduced they were optional. Car manufacturers didn’t make a lot of cars with belts and even if they did, most drivers weren’t buying them. Seatbelts only became widely adopted when they became mandatory by regulation, as unpopular as it was at the time. As a participant in HRM’s democracy, it is crucial that you write your councillor this budget season and give your support for things that are important to you, especially if they might be a bit unpopular in the current moment. Things like: raising taxes (at least above inflation), systemic reform of bureaucratic processes, diversifying municipal revenue sources, or planning for a future without an automotive transportation monopoly. Because like value engineering, councillor decision making is a garbage in garbage out system; but unlike value engineering, you can make sure at least some of what is going into your councillor’s decision making isn’t garbage.
