I was discussing the proposed Waterside Centre development with someone this morning, and we both came to the realization that there are some pretty complicated process issues involved with delaying the vote on the application until after the election.
Even before getting to the election issue, we have to consider that council’s procedures state that:
Appendix A (19) Only members of Council present for the entire Public Hearing are permitted to vote.
This immediately disqualifies at least three councillors from voting on the application— those who were absent from at least one of the two nights of the public hearing on Waterside (my informant tells me that includes councillors Meade, McInroy and Fougere, but the official council attendance records are not yet published, so I’m just taking their word on this).
But even more complicating is the issue of how do you extend a public hearing from one council to the next? Presumably, at least some of the present council will be replaced by newly elected members, and those new members will not have been present at the public hearing.
More, if there are substantive changes the original proposal, then a new public hearing should be held.
That’s going to have to be the case regardless, I’d think, but who knows what’ll come out the HRM legal department?
Still, this delay—I can’t see how it can be anything less than four months, given the public notification requirements— is entirely caused by developer Ben McCrea, not by the council, not by the Heritage people, not by some supposed “anti-development” forces.
This article appears in Oct 2-8, 2008.
Good observation. This is a smart move by McCrea. This proposal has been sensationalized beyond rationality. The best thing to do is back off, and give councilors a chance to make a decision without the political influence of the upcoming elections.Here is another far out reason that I have heard someone mumbling recently. Asking for a time-out to talk with Heritage Trust will allow McCrea to back out gracefully under the guise of ‘we couldn’t reach a compromise with Heritage Trust’, while the real reason maybe the change of the economic scape post sub-prime crisis. If the feasibility of this project is looking more and more unlikely, what better way to back out and leave your opponent looking like they were so ‘unreasonable’ that they caused the cancellation of the project in its entirety?
That’s not an unreasonable theory. As I’ve been pointing out, even before Waterside, in downtown Halifax there’s already something like a million square feet of new Class A commercial space in the pipeline, at some stage of proposal or approval. Sure, vacancy rates are low at the moment, but there’s no way this market can handle a million square feet of additional office space, not now and not into the foreseeable future.A related issue is that the growth of commercial space is fast outpacing the growth in downtown residential— the commercial space (if filled) would require far many more workers than the housing can provide. That means the new workers will be living in the suburbs and commuting to downtown, adding significantly to the traffic problems.