Everything you need to know about HRM council’s April 9, 2024 meeting
Things that passed
There was a public hearing at 6pm because someone wants to build a single-family home on Greenbank Court in Dartmouth, this got passed.
The BANC group wants to put a whopping 5,867 residential units on what is currently Exhibition Park. Councillor Patty Cuttell wanted this deferred because there were a lot of unanswered questions. After a long debate where staff explained starting this planning process is how to get those answers. As a result Cuttell’s motion to defer was defeated. After another bit of debate, this was passed to start the planning process.
Council is standing up a working group to create an action plan to combat Islamophobia, this comes from the Women’s Advisory Committee.
Councillor Pam Lovelace wanted Hammonds Plains Road to be removed from a bylaw making it a controlled-access street. This would allow subdivisions in her district to have a secondary automotive egress in times of emergency. But this was deferred as the city needs to wait for some information from the province.
People are using Bay Lookout Park like it has always been used. This is an issue because when the city took over the park from the federal government a few years ago the city changed the rules. Lovelace wants to know if bylaws and signs and stuff should be updated to try and get people to use the park according to the new rules. This’ll get a report.
And a whole slew of in camera stuff.
Notable Debates
When Cuttell put forward her motion for deferral for a new development proposed for the Halifax Exhibition Park she kicked off a firestorm of a debate. Ultimately Cuttell’s concerns are reasonable ones. In fact her concerns were so reasonable that the city has processes in place that are supposed to address most if not all of the concerns raised by Cuttell. The development proposed by the BANC group would see over 5,000 units on the Exhibition grounds and the claim is that this will be a complete community. Although, it should be noted that at this point the development is roads and housing (and parking) and that’s it. Regular readers of The Coast will recognize this development pattern is the root cause of most if not all of the fiscal challenges facing the HRM today. Cuttell pointed out that this development was all roads when she pointed out that there was no plan for things like schools or transit.
Councillor Tim Outhit also pointed out that this developer, the BANC group wants to build the Exhibition Grounds and Bedford Commons but at the same time, this developer also doesn’t have the money to develop Bloomfield. So he wanted to know if the city vetted developers to see if this project was even feasible for the BANC group. The answer is no, because council just does city planning, and doesn’t do city building.
Councillors Waye Mason and Shawn Cleary and staff pointed out that a lot of the concerns Cuttell has about the development, like whether or not the city will need to build fire stations or where the school would go for 1,000 or so kids who would live in this development, are supposed to be addressed during the planning process.
But councillor Kathryn Morse (who had a strong debate) correctly identified that a development at the Exhibition Park would cost the city a lot to build out the infrastructure required to achieve council’s stated goals, like complete communities. She wanted to know if the city prioritized developments like Strawberry Hill, which would be a lot cheaper for the city because the HRM has already built a lot of infrastructure in the area, over ones that would require building additional infrastructure like this one in Exhibition Park. As it turns out, that’s not really something we do, and why places like Indigo Shores get built without fire hydrants.
Something else the city doesn’t do is actually build complete communities. This was pointed out by councillor Sam Austin who said that even though the municipal planning process is supposed to result in things like complete communities, the HRM hasn’t really built complete communities since 1939. This means that the city doesn’t know how to plan for complete communities, with some municipal departments being particularly bad. Take for example the department of Public Work who have a strategic priority of “Traffic Management.” Due to physics, it is impossible to build a complete community around personal vehicles that require a couple hundred square feet to move, and a couple hundred feet of storage space at either end of the trip. The physics behind prioritizing car commutes is what routinely, completely and fundamentally undermines the city’s ability to re-learn how to build complete communities.
For their part, the developers in the city, who are guided by municipal planning, also don’t really know how to build complete communities anymore. For example, said Austin, there is no complete community that would require this much parking.
