City needs help to punish delinquent developers

The regularly scheduled Halifax Regional Council meeting of Tuesday, August 20 was dominated by wildfire. In the Committee of the Whole section of the meeting, councillors got a report about last year’s Upper Tantallon fire from the Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency Department.

The report is the result of HRFE’s internal after-action policies, which they use to learn lessons from fires to improve emergency response. It was shared with council because the lessons HRFE have now formally learned are important to share with council and the public, so we all get a better understanding of what our city needs to change to adapt to the new threats posed to us by the changing climate.
The HRFE found that the Upper Tantallon wildfire was a “perfect storm” of environmental factors and risks due to the built environment, from car dependency to the wildland-urban interface. The changing climate is changing fires, and both nationally and in Halifax the new fires are outpacing fire services’ ability to respond.

A deep dive into some of the findings of the report can be found here:

Some highlights from the debate included HRFE chief Ken Stuebing explaining to councillor Kathryn Morse that the geography and built environment of the HRM delayed the fire department’s ability to get more trucks and people to the fire. Although the first truck was on scene seven minutes after the 911 call came in, it took Stuebing an hour and a half to get to the fire even with lights and sirens. He also told councillor Tim Outhit that not much has changed in the past year, structurally speaking. Stuebing told the committee that a lot of problems can be solved with money, but structural ones require political will to fix: The city needs to build better communities and better regulate the Wildland Urban Interface.

Councillor Waye Mason pointed out that future communications strategies need to manage expectations more effectively. Our everything-on-demand, next-day delivery culture means people expected up-to-the-second information about the status of their homes well before the information was available.

And to round it out, councillor Becky Kent, who routinely lobbies for low taxes during the budget process, took the opportunity of this debate to remind everyone that emergencies like this are good reasons to raise taxes to fund more emergency services, specifically the police.

Things that passed

Council day with a bonus Committee of the Whole!

The CoW (which is a council meeting but where councillors can talk more) met to do the after-action debrief of the Upper Tantallon wildfire. Just one final point on this massive report: Firefighters got everyone out, and nobody died. And we really should underline the enormity of that fact.

According to the timeline in the report, the first 911 call about a fire in Upper Tantallon came at 15:26 in the afternoon of May 28, 2023. Just 16 minutes later, at 15:42, things started to get out of control, and evacuations began. This specific part of the HRM is very hard to evacuate due to its car-dependent design. Yet, even though the fire moved very fast—and even though Upper Tantallon was built to exacerbate the risks of fast-moving fire—nobody died.

There was also normal council stuff too, like changes to the AirBnB regulation bylaws, which aims to decrease the administrative burden on short-term rental landlords who now will no longer have to prove they didn’t make any money and, therefore, don’t need to remit taxes. But as the city passed this legislation, the short-term rental platforms also changed their practices and will now be collecting the marketing levy and remitting it on short-term landlords’ behalf. The short-term rental platforms themselves have also removed the administrative burden this legislation aimed to remove, which may make this expedited legislative change redundant. This passed unanimously.

It should be noted that the poor in the HRM still have the administrative burden of proving they don’t have enough money to pay for HRM’s services before receiving them.

Council approved the Lake Echo Community Centre operating agreement on the consent agenda.

The municipal governance of Sheet Harbour is a bit of a soup sandwich and has been very poorly managed since 2006. The city is now proposing that the city start collecting an area rate and give it to the Sheet Harbour Area Chamber of Commerce so that the chamber can do snow clearing of an HRM-owned sidewalk. Grab your spoons because this passed on consent.

Council adopted a legislative framework that allows the city to designate parts of roads as trails for ATVs, and to allow designating roads as trails to continue into the future (as required). This was passed on consent.

There are 19 residents of Gaetz Brook who are going to start paying 33% of the cost of paving Lake Hill Drive. Everyone else in the HRM is paying for 16.67% of these paving costs, and every taxpayer in the province is paying for 50% of this cost. Council approved this spending on the consent agenda.

The Halifax Convention Centre has provided its annual report to council, which was also passed on the consent agenda.

Also on the consent agenda was changing the fees for sports field rentals as part of the playing field strategy policy refresh. The TL;DR is that playing fields are being reclassified, and the city is updating the rental fees. Some fees are going up, but most are going down to align with the new classification. Most adult and youth bookings should see a decrease in rental fees by 1.2%. This is the first strategic policy refresh that’s happened entirely under the new CAO, and I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but this has been an excellent strategic update (so far). For sports fans, this is like when your team hires a new coach who shows a lot of promise at lower levels and then starts to demonstrate that promise at the new higher level. For example, the Halifax Wanderers’ head coach Patrice Gheisar (last season).

Council’s approved buying some land it needs for the Cogswell redevelopment. You guessed it, also on the consent agenda.

So you know how earlier in this article and many times over the past few years, I’ve hammered the city on means testing poor people to access municipal rec services? This has been a known issue for years, and councillor Tony Mancini has seen how this means testing prevents the residents of North Dartmouth from accessing rec services or, as staff write in the report to council, “Due to missing or incorrect paperwork, some applicants were not approved.” And “one of the greatest barriers to accessing HRM Recreation Programs is the registration process; only 27% (1,847) of the Recreation Access Program registrants enrolled in programs in 2023-2024. Further work is required to explore why that number is so low.” (Spoiler alert, it’s the administrative burden of means testing.) Anyways, big kudos are in order if the city gets this right, and this report signals the start of the HRM trying to remove the barriers of means testing. Staff are predicting that the currently proposed changes would cost $700,000, and boy do I have some good news for the city. I know how to raise $700,000! This got approved and will come back with budget implications during the upcoming budget season.

In the past the city has found it hard to give out money to developments that were building affordable housing. Frequently the proposed developments of NGOs for affordable housing would collapse under the weight of administrative processes and lack of money. The city’s proposing tweaks to the affordable housing grants program that would allow more money to get out the door and slightly alleviate some aspects of the administrative processes. If that summary is not enough for you, the weeds of what council approved can be found here.

If developers are naughty, they get fined. If naughty developers have unpaid fines, the city has no way to stop itself from approving proposed developments from these developers as long as their proposed developments are in line with Municipal Planning Strategies. And the city can’t give itself the power to prevent naughty developers from building—that power can only be granted by the province. So the city is going to write a letter to the province to ask for permission to give itself power to prevent delinquent developers from getting more developments approved. These are some great governance systems we got goin’ on. This was pulled off the consent agenda by councillor Morse, who did so to say that developers being able just not to pay fines is a lot messed up. She wanted something more than writing a letter to the province, because not paying fines is criminal behaviour, and the city should be allowed to stop this. But the city can’t, this power is held by the province. So the province must delegate power to the city or wield it itself. Since it was approved, hopefully, this letter will get the province moving.

The city will give the Lake District Recreation Association more money because the guy running it made a Facebook post about how the HRM isn’t giving them money to put in the ice. Councillor Mancini took issue with the LDRA’s catty Facebook-post conflict resolution strategies. This type of conflict resolution strategy is most often employed by poorly run organizations so Mancini wanted to make sure the city was making sure the LDRA’s books are in order before they get more money. Chief administrative officer Cathie O’Toole said the city has seen their books. Council ultimately approved $25,000 and local councillors are kicking in $50,000 from their district capital funds.

Council approved starting the work on the Watershed Management Framework. This is vital work, and you can get more info on this from my report here.

Councillor Sam Austin pulled this off the consent agenda to get more information on the steering committee that will be leading the pilot. He was worried that developers on the steering committee would be able to steer the pilot away from good environmental stewardship if they didn’t want to take on the additional costs of protecting the environment. He wanted to make sure the steering committee was not being set up with built-in regulatory capture. Staff reassured him that developers will be part of the committee, as they are part of society, but staff are the ones at the helm. Staff, unlike developers, have the directive to make sure this steering committee will achieve the goals of council as described in things like HalifACT. Developers won’t have veto power, but they will have a voice at the table. This passed with this reassurance.

Council approved $17,500 for NOWADAYS music festival.

Councillor Austin will get a staff report on how we can retrofit stormwater infrastructure to be more natural.

Councillor Mason will get a staff report to see if the city can have a dedicated envelope of money for signature events to help stabilize their funding models and ensure their long-term survival.

Councillor Pam Lovelace will get a staff report on whether the HRM can extend the water service boundary up in Hammonds Plains. Lovelace amended this motion to declassify in-camera documents about the decision to extend the water main up Pockwock Road. Councillor Iona Stoddard chimed in to support this, highlighting her concerns that the area is already experiencing low water flow and is about to add 2,000 more residents. Once amended, this passed.