HRM council to consider a plan that solves everything

OOn Tuesday, June 20, the Halifax Regional Municipality Committee will meet before its normal council meeting. For those with an active social life, the committee of the whole is still a formal council meeting, but the rules around debate have been relaxed to allow councilors to have a more in-depth discussion of an issue or report. In this case, they will consider the holistic plan for the future of HRM in the boring title Draft regional municipal planning strategy, dated June 2023.

This planning strategy is a compact policy document that will determine how the city of Halifax grows in the future. As The Coast has reported, Halifax has abandoned its pre-car city planning in favor of adopting the post-war North American trend of the sprawl of suburban motorists has left the city extremely vulnerable to the climate emergency burning through our backyards.

It will take some time for this report to be fully processed, but there are a few key early points somewhat camouflaged by bureaucratic jargon. They are the proposed changes to development costs and municipal service boundaries.

Development costs

As the city has learned 2003, 2013 And 2023the suburbs are one Ponzi scheme. This pattern of development has made HRM more fiscally vulnerable and made development and real estate companies increasingly wealthy. What happens, like in Indigo Shores, is a developer installs a suburb with as few frills as possible, like not enough hydrants and not enough transit options, so the city then has to come in and install and maintain all the additional infrastructure that should have been built in the first place.

This has been such a huge windfall for developers because the fees the city charges them are extremely low and not nearly enough to cover development costs. In effect, the nominal taxpayer subsidizes developer profits in HRM. And there have been decades of developers and politicians pushing to keep fees low to encourage new investment in the suburban growth plan. Which in turn laid the groundwork for Tantallon to become the death trap it was exposed to a few weeks ago.

This municipal plan aims to make developers pay their fair share to develop the city, which they have not done adequately so far.

The municipal service boundary

This boundary will remain largely altered until the population within it reaches one million. All future growth is planned for areas of the HRM with the service boundary, and that’s it (for a long time, barring a handful of exceptions already underway). One of the ways to save a poor city a ton of money is to have more people pay for existing infrastructure. And how do we get people to pay for more infrastructure? By making places where there is water supply more densely populated.

Not changing the municipal service boundary as we grow. It’s deceptively simple, but it’s wildly controversial. And in addition…

This plan will not expire

Previous municipal planning documents only lasted about 10 years before the municipality would review them. This municipal plan has no end date. It is based on decades of public participation, but as the activist community often tells the council – with palpable frustration – that change is happening at a glacial pace. This happens partly because it doesn’t really make sense to invest a lot of money in something that could disappear in 10 years at the whim of a future municipality.

With no expiration date, that should, in theory, remove institutional reluctance to commit to long-term implementation of this plan. This should give our municipal bureaucracy the necessary flexibility to respond effectively to the increasing threats of inequality and the climate emergency.

The city is seeking public feedback on this plan for the next four months. And proof that our city council is listening to us is all over this note. But it’s probably going to be a pretty big fight to get this plan executed as it is, with all the good sustainable policies in it. Because the development allowance changes and the planned densification of existing suburban landscapes will directly affect the two groups of people who have historically had the most power in shaping this city: developers and landowners.

If we want to change our current trajectory, if we want to live in a sustainable city, we have to hit hard in the next four months. Be ruthless in your communication with your councillor. Tell them that keeping the municipal service limit where it is will lower your taxes and save the planet. Go to meetings. Do the audience engagement surveys. Leave comments to city officials at pop-up events and tell them that fairness and climate action are important to you, and therefore development costs should be high enough to cover the installation and maintenance of required public services. Demand the implementation of boring policies. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. We have a dull, but tangible opportunity to make Halifax a world-class city, as the endless employee reports always tell us we could be.