During Tuesday’s meeting of council, outside of City Hall the winds were so strong that Barrington’s streetlamps were being vigorously buffeted outside the windows of Halifax Hall. They moshed with the wind for the entirety of council’s hours-long in-camera debate about a motion. The motion—number 17.2, about “INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS”—was moved up to 1 o’clock, so it interrupted the main event of the meeting, setting the committee rosters in the HRM for the next two years. And that was rather unfortunate, because this procedure-heavy meeting’s as consequential as it was boring.
The meeting started with some excitement, as rookie councillor John A. Young asked to remove his bevy of motions from the agenda. The half-dozen motions asked for staff reports about various transportation issues in his district. But Young said he was going to talk to staff before putting motions on the floor. This is likely because most of what he was asking for is or should be captured by existing municipal plans. For example, the HRM’s new sidewalk level service plan should capture his motion on the Lakeview Avenue sidewalk plans.
After that, council set its meeting schedule and budget season’s schedule. If councillors are our team, then the budget debates are their season. And like in every sport, when the league announce the schedule for the season it’s always a big day. It means the season is right around the corner and excitement starts to build.
For those who need it, here’s an explainer of Halifax’s budget process.
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Demystifying Halifax’s budget process
First up at budget time is the pre-season. This is the part of the process where they talk about capital projects and the long-term big-picture stuff the city wants to do. Even though it is pre-season, some things get finalized because next year’s construction tenders need to go out right as budget season wraps up in April, so we’ll have a pretty good idea of how disappointed with the Integrated Mobility Plan’s implementation we will be by Feb 5, 2025. Property valuation services will also make their seasonal appearance to let everyone know what’s going on with taxes this year.
Up next is the regular season, where council will set the operating budgets of each business unit. How this process usually works is the business units will have a look at what they are currently doing, and they’ll have a look at what council wants them to be doing. Then they figure out how much it would cost to keep doing what they are doing and/or change to what council wants them to be doing, and put all of that information in an annual budget they bring to council for approval.
In practical terms, for a department like Halifax Transit, the staff in the department would read things like Halifax’s overarching strategic plan, People. Planet. Prosperty, and other relevant plans like the Integrated Mobility Plan, HalifACT, the Rapid Strategy Plan and the Moving Forward Together Plan. They would see that Halifax’s city councillors have told them they want to see more people on the bus, and more reliable bus service. And then they’d come up with a plan to achieve that goal. Or ignore all of that and put together a budget to get fewer people on the bus like they did last year.
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Halifax Transit planning for a ridership decrease
To be fair to Halifax Transit staff, ridership will likely increase massively if/when Bus Rapid Transit is fully implemented. But that is a huge multi-year plan requiring some pretty substantial changes to Halifax’s infrastructure. For BRT to be successful, buses will need dedicated space in the choke points of Halifax’s transportation network. To be clear, for BRT to be successful, it needs to be reliable, which means it can’t get caught in congestion. This, in turn, means BRT’s success must also include things like turning two bridge lanes into bus lanes, or substantial additions to Halifax’s ferry fleet, or other similarly large changes to prevent private vehicle congestion from negatively affecting public transit reliability on public roads. But big costs like that aren’t for the annual budget; they’re the type of thing council would discuss at the February 5 capital budget recommendations meeting, as well as on committees, which we’ll get to later.
Sometimes the changes required by strategic plans are not as drastic as converting bus lanes or bulk buying voight-Schnieder drive ferries (which now have electric models), but they are a bit more than can be squeezed into the annual budget. Or, maybe the department is new, like the Public Safety Department, and needs to add stuff to its annual budget as it establishes itself as a municipal department. In those cases departments would ask for more money, and if council wants to consider the new spending, they’ll add it to the playoffs of budget season, the budget adjustment list debates.
It’s not just new spending that goes to the budget adjustment list—the BAL. New revenue sources, like increasing parking fees, would also be up for discussion at the BAL debates. So too would service cuts, like the times public works have proposed bi-weekly rural garbage pickup schedules for urban areas to save money. These debates, like the playoffs, tend to get quite spicy. They’re happening after March break.
Then, once those debates are done and spending is finalized, the city’s financial team puts all those speculative budgets into the city’s actual books and brings the whole thing back to council for ratification. Once the budget is ratified, out come the champagne googles, and councillors start spraying bubbly around while taking turns drinking out of the Jerry Blackwood Spreadsheet Trophy. Or, like most years, it’ll be a relatively anti-climactic affair that’s just part of a routine council meeting. Could go either way; we’ll find out in April.
Once the business of setting the schedule was concluded, council then filled out their roster of standing committees. Some committees, like the community councils, are regional committees whose membership is determined by geography. For example, the Harbour East Community Council, often called Halifax and East Community Council, is made up of councillors on the eastern side of the harbour. The Halifax and West Community Council—often called Harbour West because of course it is under this atrocious naming convention—is made of councillors on the west side of Halifax. They deal with local geographic issues, like zoning changes and development agreements.
Halifax also has standing committees that deal with large municipal planning issues. They are the Transportation Standing Committee, the Audit and Finance Standing Committee, the Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee, and the Community Planning and Economic Development Committee. Each of those is made up of six councillors: one from each of Halifax’s three community councils, and the other three elected from council to serve a two-year term.
In an ideal world, with this setup Halifax’s standing committees would be made up of the best councillors to represent the local angles of these issues, and then the councillors with the best backgrounds (lived, professional, policy or other) would be selected from amongst the rest. These are the special teams of the municipal politics world. In much the same way Sidney Crosby should be on the ice for the power play but maybe not the penalty kill, we want the best councillors for the roles on these committees. So how did we do?
Audit and Finance
The Audit and Finance Committee nominations started off fairly smooth, as councillors David Hendsbee, Shawn Cleary and Cathy Deagle Gammon got the community council seats with no contest. Councillors Billy Gillis and Jean St-Amand put their names forward as members at large, but then no one wanted the last position. Deagle Gammon put Kathryn Morse up for nomination but Morse refused, saying she was going for a spot on Community Planning.
Councillor Tony Mancini was absent from the Tuesday Nov 19 affair, and councillor Becky Kent put him forward after the city lawyers’ clarification that it was okay to sandbag Mancini with the committee position. The clerks said that the people who get nominated really should want the job because there’s a lot of work to be done.
The Chief Administrative Officer told councillors that this was the most important committee, and there is training available for people who might be intimidated by it. This committee has a lot of responsibilities, as they’re the ones who oversee the money and do other important governance stuff, like ensuring the Auditor General’s recommendations are being implemented. In a huge pickup for Audit and Finance, Morse came around and accepted the nomination. For those keeping score at home, the committee members ended up being: Deagle Gammon, Hendsbee, Cleary, Morse, Gillis and St-Amand.
Community Planning and Economic Development
There was a bit of a kerfuffle over this one, as both Sam Austin and Trish Purdy wanted a spot on Transportation Standing Committee, which meant neither of them wanted the regional spot on CPED. But this nomination process was interrupted by lunch and a few hours of in-camera meeting, and by the time council came back Purdy had accepted the nomination, ceding Transportation to Austin. With the regional reps set, the at-large members were harder to find as Young took himself out of contention. Perhaps because it was late in the day and the rules of order were relaxed, councillors sorted it out amongst themselves and CPED ended up with a membership of: Deagle Gammon, Kent, Purdy, Patty Cuttell, Janet Steel and St-Amand.
Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee
There was not much debate on this one, but it’s shaping up to be a strong committee, which is good as humanity works to limit the catastrophe of the impending climate breakdown. Veteran councillor Austin is a strong climate legislator, and Mancini is a competent one. Deagle Gammon is on an upward trajectory, and they’re joined by rookie councillors Laura White, Nancy Hartling and Steele, who are all showing promise.
Transportation Standing Committee
The most popular committee by far was the Transportation Standing Committee, as most councillors understand that the city is at a crossroads. Down one road is a mixed-use road with reliable transit and safe walking and cycling infrastructure. Commute times are down; people are happier and healthier; and small businesses are booming as their customers slowly stop spending $1,000 a month on their cars and spend it at local businesses instead.
The other road is continuing how we’ve always done things, which means we accept transportation poverty and random violence as the cost of moving around the city. Accept the noise and pollution. Accept that having a child is committing to being a chauffeur because car infrastructure is unsafe. Accept the mind-numbing, unending irritation and stress of 10km commutes that take an hour to drive. But because this road is all quite normal, it’s quite popular and, therefore, appealing to some politicians. Of which the Transportation Standing Committee has at least one in Purdy.
The good news is that the other members of the committee—Austin, Cleary, Morse and usually-but-not-always Patty Cuttell—will choose the other, better path for the city’s future transportation.
Councillor Young rounds out this committee, and is still too much of a wildcard for your correspondent to have a sense which way he’ll vote.
This article appears in Nov 7-30, 2024.