The Utility and Review Board this morning released its decision about HRM’s new electoral boundaries.
The board mostly agreed with city staff’s recommended Scenario 1 — Revised, with these major exceptions:
Cole Harbour was completely reformulated to be its own district, rather than split between three adjoining districts.
Upper Sackville was broken off as its own electoral district, including Lucasville and Beaverbank.
The Eastern Shore was split in two, one northern and one southern section, meaning that the Old Guysborough Road corridor out through the Musquodoboit Valley is now part of the Fall River district.
The Cow Bay/ Eastern Passage district was eliminated by taking the northern areas and adding them to the new Cole Harbour district, and adding the remaining southern and western regions to the district containing Portland Hills and Portland Estates.
The decision has numerous other, lesser changes as well. The main effect of the changes are found in this table:
In practical terms, this means that voters in Fall River and Upper Sackville have a more powerful vote than do voters on the peninsula.
The UARB attempted to justify giving disproportionate voting power to those areas because:
In the Board’s opinion, this rural area of District B/2 represents one of exceptional cases which justifies a departure from the ±10% variance that normally applies. Likewise, the larger negative variances i n the Upper Sackville and Sackville polling districts (Le., -18.8°Al and -13.2%, respectively) are also justified because of the
significant growth expected in/the Margeson Drive area.
But this doesn’t reflect the population increases called for in the city’s regional plan:
The citizens of HRM have indicated through consultation that a balanced approach to growth across the Municipality is the desired approach. To achieve this, approximately 25% of growth will be targeted to occur on the Halifax Peninsula and in downtown Dartmouth, inside the Circumferential Highway (Regional Centre), approximately 50% will occur in the suburban areas, and the remaining 25% will occur within the rural areas. This is consistent with projected housing demand in HRM12.
It’s true that Upper Sackville is expected to see more growth in coming years, although none of the planning documents I’ve reviewed attempt to quantify that growth.
Planning documents do, however, put specific numbers on expected growth in what is now just two electoral districts on the peninsula, calls for:
This Plan provides for short, medium and long-term development growth targets. Within the next 15 years, this Plan provides capacity for at least 16,000 [more] residents, 15,000 jobs, and up to three million square feet of office development within downtown Halifax.
Got that? Sackville is going to get some unknown number of new residents, so that voting district gets to be a lot smaller—that is, each vote will count more than all other votes in HRM– but downtown, which is going to get a whole lot more new residents, has bigger electoral districts, meaning each vote counts less than votes elsewhere in HRM, because, well, just because.
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This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2011.
Aww, poor Dawn “The Mouth” Sloane was practically in tears on the Rick Howe Show saying how downtown will be devastated because it was split in two. More likely she was in tears because now she is screwed and will not get re-elected. So what exactly what has she done for downtown? I haven’t seen any developement other than some gentrification on Gottingen.
I don’t find the UARB’s logic very convincing, although I do sense another rationale.
Many of those who live in the suburbs have never been completely happy with amalgamation. One common complaint is that suburban dwellers in various parts of the HRM pay what they feel are high property taxes but don’t obtain the same level of service from the municipal government. I don’t know how valid that complaint is. I live in central Dartmouth. But I do think there is a very real possibility that the redistricting was significantly influenced by political considerations – a classic example of gerrymandering.
As you pointed out, Tim, the voices of the citizens in the suburbs, currently the least population dense areas of the HRM, will be given outsize influence in the new HRM council at the expense of citizens in the urban core. I can think of a host of reasons why some in the local political and business establishments would think that was a good thing.
I think it comes down to whether you believe in planned growth or expected growth, and planned distribution or expected distribution. I haven’t seen very much in the recorded history of this city (and for close to half a century of those recorded years I’ve been here myself) to indicate that municipal planning has had other than short-term and negligible effects on where people choose to live. The Regional Plan can “target” all it likes, but people will live where they want to live. And guess what – if zoning and plans conflict with where people want to live, the zoning and plans will change. This has invariably happened, it is happening as we speak, and it will continue to happen. Best intentions aside.
I think the UARB is being pragmatic. It may look like politics, but in this case it’s justifiable politics. If their pragmatism is justified then a decade or two from now we’ll see the population adjustments, and representation will actually be quite equitable.
As for amalgamation, I don’t think it’s just folks in the suburbs who are unhappy with it. Not only should we never have absorbed the rural areas, but I personally don’t see that there’s enough commonality of interests to have justified an amalgamation of the urban/suburban core. There *are* some common interests, sure, like efficiencies in mass transit, but you can arrange that without becoming a single political entity. Oh well.
Drawing these lines is for sure not an easy task and is certainly more complicated than less population/district = more voting power/district. For example would it really be fair if the Fall River district councillor had the same amount of constituents as one of the peninsula districts? On one hand you’d have a councillor representing a small neat area of people with similar interests (peninsula) and on the other you’d have a councillor trying to do the same job but covering ground from Waverley to Musquodoboit Valley which includes not only people a lot further apart (a lot more time spent doing legwork provided the councillor is doing a proper job) but also a much broader demographic with regards to community interests (rural and suburban).
I don’t support adding a fourth level of government.
I don’t believe community council is meaningful unless it is fiscally empowered.
I don’t believe in the regionalist model of government as I support Localism in local Government.
I don’t believe in the good will and wisdom of elected officials to support anybody other than their constituents who they believe vote them in and out of office.
I don’t believe in letting our entire system of government be the victim of “projected growth patterns”. In fact the opposite, government should lend a hand in shaping growth for the benefit of the communities.
I don’t believe that the reduction of councilors will result in any of the vaguely alluded to benefits nor do I believe it will help move toward better government.
And I don’t believe in an unelected, unaccountable body of elites running the whole show at the end of the day (UARB).
Now, you can say what you like about each of those beliefs, but none of them are extreme or unusual. Any one of them would cause question of the UARB and the changes at council. Taken together they would make a reasonable person quite skeptical of anyone who didn’t look at this turn of events with a critical eye.
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Is there any way Darrell Dexter or someone can get rid of or reform this undemocratic, homophobic body known as the UARB? I know it’s all about checks and balances, but they (the UARB) are really starting to make it so that it really sucks to live in this city