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After an impromptu summer break the Grand Parade is back! Host Matt Stickland sits down with the owner of Atlantic New Chris Greene to talk about how to interview candidates for the upcoming fall election.
Chris will be sitting down the candidates of District 7 to interview them and find out who would be the best candidate for his district and wanted to advice.
Happy to oblige, Matt explains how he and The Coast are vetting candidates for the fall election.
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In what was supposed to be the last episode of the HFX Votes 2024 election podcast series The Coast's city hall reporter Matt Stickland sat down with The Coast’s newsletter editor Julie Lawrence to answer some listener questions.
The conversation bounces around as the two try to answer as many questions as possible. There are a bunch of simple questions like “Does Halifax have enough parking?” that have relatively simple answers like “Yes.”
But some questions sparked more interesting and nuanced conversations, like ‘Should Halifax reduce the size of its bureaucracy?’ and ‘What makes a suburb?’ There is also a definitely real award given out to the listener who asked the best question.
But this will not be the last episode in the series, I heard back from the infrastructure expert I was trying to interview, and we’re in the process of setting up the interview. So stay tuned for that in your podcast feeds.
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There are two types of people in this world. There are people who think that headline is needlessly dramatic, and then there are people who understand risk management. The Coast has covered risk management extensively since Halifax’s Auditor General released his scathing indictments of the city’s Risk Management Team, but this is one of those things that just can’t be talked about enough until the issues are fixed.
In this episode of the Grand Parade, Matt talks through his research to date from a 2014 Halifax Transit oil spill to today. The conversation covers the big things like Halifax’s risk management team being the wrong people for the job to the minutia, like taxing under-utilized parking lots near transit terminals.
The long and short of it is that this city is not taking Risk Management seriously, and your future is in jeopardy in the most boring possible way. The next crop of councillors needs to do a better job of addressing these risks, which means we need to do a better job of vetting them when they come to our doors. This, unfortunately, requires you to consume the civic education version of your least favourite vegetable and gain a baseline understanding of what risk management is and how it affects your life. You can do this by listening to the latest episode of the Grand Parade here.
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In this penultimate episode of the HFX Votes 2024 election explainer series, Matt interviews Risk Management expert Bruce Manion. This episode is a direct result of Halifax’s Auditor General’s recent audits in which he found the HRM’s risk management framework to be a bit of a hot mess.
In this episode, Bruce explains to Matt how the city should be thinking about Risk Management and the problem with the city moving its risk management team from the accountants to the lawyers back in 2021. This conversation moves around a lot, from crashing ships to various levels of government approving the building of death trap subdivisions.
This conversation also launched Matt into the rabbit hole of the municipal Enterprise Risk Register, and it looks like how the city identifies risks in the first place is fundamentally flawed. More on this when Matt finishes reporting it out, but subscribers of The Coast will get a little preview of what Matt is investigating in City Hall Insider, which hits inboxes at 10:30 on Monday mornings.
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The HFX Votes 2024 series is in the process of wrapping up, with three episodes recorded yesterday to be released over the next few days. Up first is an interview with Céo Gaudet, a former member of the Regional Watersheds Advisory Board.
For a little bit of history, the RWAB had a predecessor, the Dartmouth Lakes Advisory Board, which started in the 1970s. At the time, there was a lot of development going on and very few, if any, environmental assessments of procedures. But what was noticeable was the increase in silt in Dartmouth Lakes.
So, the city of Dartmouth helped form this board, which was filled out with scientific, environmental, and local experts and organizations. Once formed, the board advised Dartmouth’s city council and the city of Dartmouth listened.
In the intervening years, the city has professionalized its bureaucracy and added some in-house environmental assessments to the development agreement process. This led to the city trying to disband the RWAB last council term, but councillors voted to keep it because they deemed independent oversight as important. Now, thanks to some provincial legislation, the RWAB is gone for good.
In this episode, Matt and Céo take a deep dive into what the city of Halifax has lost in losing its independent environmental oversight. Just an administrative note: We got sidetracked, so Ceo never finished explaining the issues with blue-green algae. When plants and/or blue-green algae die, they fall to the bottom and decompose. That takes up a lot of oxygen and makes the lake anoxic, which kills other lake life, like the eels mentioned.
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In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt Stickland sits down with Wes Marshall, the author of Killed by a Traffic Engineer.
His book is a meta analysis of traffic engineering studies, and he tells Matt how to determine if Halifax's traffic engineers are doing a good job.
Just one note: In the episode Matt says that the HRM has made it's traffic impact statements better, and Wes points out that if they were an improvement they would consider safety. The good news is that the new traffic impact statements consider non-car modes of travel, but only consider safety in the context of car on car collisions. Not driver vs pedestrian. There's still a long way to go before Halifax's traffic impact statements are good, even if they are slightly improved from 2017
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In this edition of HFX Votes 2024 I sit down with two of the authors of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report: Building Inclusive Communities: A Policy Agenda for Nova Scotia Municipalities that Leaves No One Behind.
In this conversation, Christine Saulnier the CCPA’s Nova Scotia director, explains how the city could save a lot of money by bringing services, like snow clearing, in-house. She also explains how the way we do snow removal might be a little bit sexist.
The other other, Kyle Buott, gives some practical solutions to the city. Did you know there’s a way the city could make more revenue *and* get Canadian National Railway to let us use their tracks for light rail?
Two administrative notes: First, in the episode I say that the land lord registry is coming into effect, that’s not true, it’s been in effect since April 1, 2024. And second, you may notice that citation 169 has me as an author, please calibrate your critical thinking appropriately.
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In this episode of the Grand Parade's ongoing series of municipal issues explainer, I sit down with mayor Mike Savage to find out what the mayor does. This conversation bounces around from the fiscal challenges facing the city, some practical advice for running a good meeting and an answer to the question: Does Mike find it weird that people call him "Your Worship?"
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In part 2 of the HFX Votes 2024 episode on property taxes I sat down with Darrell Dexter, the former premier of Nova Scotia to ask him about why we have a property tax cap in the first place. This conversation went off the rails almost immediately in the best possible way. Dexter explains that the property tax cap is doing its job, protecting people from being gouged by the market.
Dexter makes the case that if a city needs money then it’s incumbent on councillors to use the other tools at their disposal to make their budget make sense. As part of this discussion, Dexter also talked about the philosophy behind policy-making and how to anticipate outcomes.
After thinking about this conversation over the Canada Day weekend there I have my first question for The Coast’s I now have that will continue to inform my municipal coverage:
If the city needs money, which we do, if you (candidate) want to freeze or lower property taxes, then what revenue tools will you be using to cover the shortfall of lowered or frozen taxes?
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The Coast’s municipal election podcast explainers continue with a deep dive into property taxes and the property tax cap. In this episode, Matt sits down with local economist Deny Sullivan to ask him some questions like: What is the property tax cap? How does it work? Is our council penny-wise and pound-foolish?
The two get sidetracked a little bit when the conversation veers into the new road safety framework and how it demonstrates a lack of fiscal responsibility by the city. Deny explains his property taxation philosophy and how council could be doing more to fix city finances while also getting housing built in a housing crisis.
As it turns out, keeping our capped property taxes low benefits land lords a lot, and doesn’t really help anyone else. Sure homeowners save a little bit a tax time, but it costs us way more in the long term when the city can’t afford to build for a better future. The two also spend some time coming up with some potential property tax fixes to afford the better world we want.
Do you still have questions you want Matt to look into? Send them to [email protected].
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In this week's episode, The Coast's Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman discuss HRM staff's eyebrow-raising plans for redesigning the Windsor Street Exchange while making transit worse, plus how councillors aren't using the powers they have at their disposal.
Also, if you have any issues you want Matt to look into for the upcoming municipal election please email them to [email protected]
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In part two of the Halifax Votes Transit episode Matt sits down with Reece Martin of RM Transit to help explain some of the choices Halifax Transit is making.
For example, in yesterday's episode It's More Than Busses' Douglas Wetmore proposed that Halifax Transit would be better served by switching to a headway bus service instead of a scheduled one. Reece Martin explains why a transit service would want to use headway, and also what a headway is.
For everything you ever needed to know about transit for the upcoming municipal election, here's HFX Votes 2024: How to fix Halifax Transit
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In this edition of HFX Votes 2024, The Coast's special municipal election coverage, Matt sits down with Douglas Wetmore of It's More than Busses.
In part one of a two-part series Matt finds out what exactly's going wrong with Halifax's beleaguered bus system. Wetmore explains the issues facing transit, some of the issues created by Halifax Transit, and some potential fixes.
It's everything you need to know about why your bus is late.
In part two which will be out later this week. Matt will sit down with an expert to find out what transit would look like if it were well run. Between these two episodes, you should have everything you need to know to ask your candidates about transit.
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In this episode Matt Stickland sat down with the CEO of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission, Paul MacKinnon in what is the first in a series of explainers leading up to the municipal election. MacKinnon is a guy who knows what a downtown needs to succeed. We talk about the challenges of making unpopular decisions and how downtowns make money for the city. MacKinnon also tells me about the new plan for downtown that his organization came up with: Vision 2030.
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In this week’s episode, The Coast’s Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman discuss HRM council’s unanimous passing of federally-prompted zoning reforms and how that will shape the city to come. Plus, Halifax has an emergency response… emergency… and the region’s transportation plans still don’t make sense.
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In this week’s episode of The Grand Parade podcast, Coast reporters Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman chat with economist Deny Sullivan about Halifax’s HAF blunders and why a labour shortage isn’t to blame for the city’s housing crisis. Plus, they delve into Halifax’s deferred plans to abandon its Strategic Road Safety Framework in favour of a new plan that is worse than the old one.
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In this edition of the Grand Parade Matt tells Martin all about his interview with Halifax's CAO Cathie O'Toole and director of the Department of Public Works Brad Anguish. Matt explains why this interview left him feeling a bit like a Philadelphia 76ers fan circa 2013.
After a break, Matt gives each councillor a rating for their performance during Halifax's budget season
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In this episode of the Grand Parade the boys take a break from the budget as Matt grapples with learning new information about the city's transportation planning.
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In this episode Coast reporters Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman give 110% as they reach into their bag of sports metaphors to talk about municipal politics in a podcast of two halves.
In the first half, Matt gives Martin the lowdown on the civil unrest growing in rural parts of the HRM. Also a look into the frustrating parts of municipal planning.
Not to be all doom and gloom, in the second half, Martin learns about all the genuinely good things taking shape for Halifax's future.
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In this episode Matt and Martin talk about public safety: the JustFOOD program and police reform. This show notes are abridged due to budget season.
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