By Giancarlos Cininni
During last Tuesday’s council meeting, chief administrative officer Brad Anguish said he’d never before seen a council interested in looking at the city’s finances. “In 22 years of servicing this municipality, I haven’t seen this interest in looking at the numbers.” He continued, “And [that] number’s looking quite large at the moment.”
And is that number ever large at the moment. Halifax will be taking out over $1.4 billion in loans over the next five years, to be exact. The money will be added to the city’s debt to fund projects needed for Halifax’s rapid growth.
Council unanimously approved to take on the first 30% of the $1.4 billion in loans from the province this year. That comes to $419,654,830 of this year’s capital projects financed in debt.
As CFO Jerry Blackwood pointed out, this $1.4 billion loan only covers the cost of ongoing projects. But not newer projects like the Windsor Street exchange, Mill Cove Ferry, and the Burnside transit center.
Nor does it count Halifax’s existing debt load. Nor does it count Halifax’s annual operating budget which will require a 10% increase in property taxes just to avoid cutting anything this year.
Mayor Fillmore was blunt about the city’s indebted future, in what he dubbed the “straight talk express.”
“We are heading into a historically high debt scenario that is going to be very uncomfortable for us,” he said. This debt will triple the city’s total debt load, up from its current figure of $250,000,000 to over $700,000,000 by 2027-28. And if that sounds rough, most of the city’s past loans had been taken at more favourable interest rates. With rates spiking and inflation increasing, the figure could grow further.
The city wants to ensure that no more than 10% of its annual budget is spent repaying debt. Right now, the city spends about 5% of its annual budget on debt, but this will drastically increase over the next few years. According to Blackwood, spending any more than 15% of the annual budget on debt is considered a “high risk zone.”
The debt means the city will have to either raise revenue by increasing property taxes and user fees (such as the price of renting public land to store a private car) or it could take the form of service cuts. But those service cuts often get rejected for being unpopular, and as Blackwood told council, staff calls those cuts “baby seals—nobody likes them, they never get approved.”
Despite the drastically growing debt, there was little debate before voting on the motion about how the city could collect more revenue from other streams, like parking, or better land use. Unlike the province, which has revenue streams like sales and income tax, the city is dependent on property taxes. And, municipal tax reform reports from 1997, 2007, and 2019 highlight that the HRM’s property tax system is as inadequate as it is inequitable.
Instead, the discussion shifted to how the city would, in Blackwood’s words, “smooth out” the debt repayment.
Like when District 12 councillor Janet Steele questioned Blackwood about generational fairness and whether today’s residents would be paying the debt for the Halifax of tomorrow. “When we think about Halifax harbour and the clean up, it’s still on our books, so that’s what made me think of this intergenerational equity aspect,” she said. Blackwood responded by saying the city started taking out debt with an extended repayment period. “In the past, outside of harbour solutions, we’ve taken ten-year debt; we are looking more at taking longer-term debt to spread the repayment over the life of the asset,” Blackwood said. “Typically right now, on any buildings, you are looking at 20-year debt.”
Relevant to the predicament of raising much-needed revenue for the municipality, District 7’s councillor, Laura White, introduced a motion to investigate the potential to create parking benefit districts—areas of the city where some of the parking fees are reinvested into public services in the part of town where the parking spots are located. This motion also included acquiring information on how the city could implement dynamic pricing, which is when the parking price adjusts based on public demand. But this motion was split in two by councillor Patty Cuttell.
Both parts passed, but with some pushback from suburban and rural councillors. Cuttel voted only against the latter dynamic pricing. Councillors Cathy Deagle Gammon, Becky Kent, Trish Purdy, John Young, and David Hendsbee, whose districts don’t bring in enough in taxes to cover their own services, voted against the targeted tax to make their constituents start to pay their fair share, which could have contributed to putting a dent in the $1.4 billion of debt needed to fund capital projects.
Parking is a contentious issue, as it represents the divide between the city’s two competing needs. The city’s need to raise revenues vs councillors’ need for a politically expedient commitment to keeping their residents placated until the next election.
Council gives up on Transit
By Matt Stickland
Back in December 2021, Halifax’s city council directed staff to make Spring Garden Road a bus-only road. On July 4, 2022, Halifax’s bus-only pilot launched with great fanfare. But only four days later, the city had given up trying to enforce the pilot. And the day after that, the Spring Garden Road Pilot died. Last Thursday, 25 September 2025, four years after the death, the Transportation Standing Committee told staff to stop wasting municipal resources trying to revive the body.
According to the staff report, the Spring Garden Road Pilot is not feasible because a physical barrier would be necessary to prevent drivers from breaking the law. In 2022, city planner Elora Wilkinson told The Coast that the project failed because the city “relied heavily on signage, police, education and enforcement.”
In the report from Thursday’s meeting, staff wrote that on weekdays, Spring Garden Road sees 999 busses. In an email to Grand Parade, city staff said those 999 busses are on routes that represented 21.6% of all of Halifax Transit’s bus service last year. In this year’s budget, that’s about $19 million in annual Transit spending just on bus service for Spring Garden Road. And what does Halifax get for all this tax money spent on public transportation operating on public roads? It’s hard to say. In answering a question from councillor Sam Austin, Patricia Hughes, a director with Halifax Transit, told the committee that it’s hard to say just how degraded Transit’s service is on Spring Garden because it’s hard to tell what slowdowns are being caused by cars on Spring Garden Road as cars hold busses up earlier in their routes, too. And as degraded as on time performance is, city staff have also been increasing the amount of time bus drivers are given to complete a route. City busses are getting later and slower thanks to council spending so much public money prioritizing private automobiles on public roads.
Sue Uteck of the Spring Garden Area Business Association spoke at the meeting and informed the committee that her business association had polled small business owners, finding that 78% of them were opposed to the Transit Pilot. This is an unusual position to take, as every time it has been studied since 1984 (mainly in the context of bike lanes), switching to a higher-capacity transit road that requires less space for things like parking has increased both small business and city revenues. Nevertheless, Spring Garden Road small business owners believe that the approximately 2000 nearby parking spots are more important for their companies’ bottom lines than the 75,924 potential customers brought to their stores by 999 daily transit busses.
Back in 2022 when the Spring Garden Road pilot project was dead but we just didn’t realize it yet, then councillor Waye Mason hoped that Public Works, the “traffic side of the house” learned from the Transit failure “because we’re going to need to take a stricter approach across the board on a whole bunch of things.”
However, Public Works did not learn anything from Spring Garden Road because in 2024, Halifax passed a new road safety strategy that relies heavily on signage, police, education and enforcement. Or as the plan reads: “Promote and model a shared culture of road safety. Educate and encourage all road users on their role in safety with knowledge of the laws and practices to safely travel within the right-of-way.” However, we already know this won’t work as a road safety strategy. Even though this year will see a massive rise in road fatalities, it will likely be labelled an outlier until the fatal flaw in our road safety strategy becomes statistically apparent. But the reasons the road safety strategy will result in more deaths on Halifax roads are the same reasons the transit pilot failed. And they’re the same reasons why, at last Thursday’s meeting, councillor Patty Cuttell asked for a staff report about people leaving scooters strewn about the city’s sidewalks. “Well, I wish we had zero parking complaints about cars, too, right?” retorted Austin to Cuttell’s motion. “Unfortunately, it is kind of the nature of humans to leave things where they’re not supposed to.” Or, in other words, the reason our plans keep failing is that we plan as though humans will be perfect, instead of planning for our reality, where humans will be selfish and break the law unless we actively and physically prevent them from doing so.
The plan for the future of Spring Garden Road will be—eventually—maybe—Bus Rapid Transit, aka dedicated bus lanes. But as we learned in last year’s Windsor Street Exchange debates, even though council passed the Rapid Transit Strategy in 2020, we still don’t have a plan to implement it. Worry not, staff told the Transportation Standing Committee that unlike the Road Safety Strategy and the Spring Garden Road Pilot, the four-year-old Bus Rapid Transit plan, which we haven’t started planning yet, will run on Spring Garden. In the meantime, we’ve accepted that public roads are for private cars to cause congestion and kill pedestrians, while wasting 19 million tax dollars a year on Spring Garden Road bus service.
The Other Stuff
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