The Grand Parade podcast: Where did Halifax’s budget crunch come from?

Halifax councillors have a choice to make, and neither option will leave them looking good: They can either opt to raise property taxes to cover a $68.7 million shortfall—a move council seems especially reluctant to do—or they can cut a mix of programs, services and capital projects from a growing list of the region’s needs.

City staff told council in November that Halifax’s real shortfall was in the neighbourhood of $105 million, until it slashed $37 million from the books by cutting back on its Strategic Initiative funding and capital-from-operating funding. But building costs are expensive. So are cars—and the HRM’s ever-expanding network of roads that service them. It was in light of this that councillor Trish Purdy asked her colleagues whether Halifax should consider a haircut of its $24-million vehicle budget. Could the HRM manage without new police cars and municipal vehicles for a year?

In this week’s episode of The Grand Parade podcast, Coast city hall reporter Matt Stickland explains to fellow reporter Martin Bauman why Halifax is in such dire financial straits. Plus, Matt gets excited about trains.