Council Update: Centre Plan Changes, The Post, Ferry, Marketing Levy

Centre Plan Changes

After a three-day public hearing, Regional Council approved changes to planning bylaws across HRM, including in District 5. The changes are designed to make it easier to construct additional housing and come in response to the unprecedented growth that HRM has been experiencing, and the resulting housing shortage. There are multiple factors that influence the supply of housing, and many of them, such as interest rates, construction costs, availability of labour, etc are beyond HRM’s control. The one factor that the municipality does completely control, however, is urban planning. What was before Council were changes to allow all areas of the city, including low-density neighbourhoods, to add additional density.

There were two clear camps that showed up to the public hearing, and they were starkly divided by wealth and age. Most of the people who opposed the zoning changes were older homeowners, while most of the people supporting the proposal were young renters. The older more established folks feared upheaval in the neighbourhoods they love, while the young folks talked about not being able to ever afford a home or even stay in HRM if something doesn’t change. The established folks frequently asked HRM to slow down potential changes while the young emphasized that this is a crisis that is affecting their lives right now. Speakers at the public hearing were sharply divided! HRM’s challenge is we have to do both: we need to accommodate more people and that means change, but we also need to protect the places that we love. Luckily, it’s not a binary choice.

The changes Council approved will allow more density in established residential areas, but not without requirements for good design. Each lot in the urban core, including District 5, can now accommodate up to eight units. Whether eight is actually possible though will depend on lot size. Large properties could hold up to eight, but smaller lots won’t be allowed more than four. There are also still restrictions on height, bedroom counts, and setbacks, and HRM has added a few additional potential heritage districts to the mix where the rules will incentivize adaptative reuse. I’m very pleased with comprehensiveness of Dartmouth’s proposed heritage districts in particular as they really cover all of the big pockets of potentially significant buildings around Downtown Dartmouth.

The expected result of the bylaw changes isn’t wholescale teardowns in existing neighbourhoods. Some buildings will be replaced, but there will also be subdivisions of larger lots, additions onto existing buildings, and backyard suites. Over the time, the result will be denser more mixed neighbourhoods and that’s not a bad thing. Below is a graphical representation of the variety of housing types that HRM’s new rules are designed to enable in the established residential neighbourhoods combined with key design requirements around parking, building height and size, and setbacks.

The graphic is practically a copy of my own block on Tulip Street! On my block there are single-unit homes, flats, a triplex, a fourplex and three multi-unit apartment buildings. There is also a long-established group home down the street that never causes any problems. Is my neighbourhood somehow a lesser place because it has a vareity of building types? Is its character somehow diminished by that diversity? I don’t think it is. In fact it’s a healthier more interesting place. Having options means that folks downsizing can stay in the neighbourhood. It means young people starting out have potential places near elderly parents. It means families seeking a home with a yard of some sort have options too. Building neighbourhoods that can provide space for everyone is what we need to do.

Centre Plan
I wanted to take a moment to address one of the questions that came up in the public hearing more than once, and that is what happened to the Centre Plan? Why did we go through all that work only to have it all go away just a few years later? The Centre Plan isn’t gone. The changes are very much in keeping with all the extensive work and consultation that went into it. High-density and low-density areas are still basically the same, what’s happening is all areas are being upzoned to accommodate more people. The guts of the Centre Plan and its design requirements are still very much there.

Consultation
Some folks expressed concern that HRM went ahead with these changes without properly consulting the public. It’s true that these changes moved much more quickly than would normally be the case. The reason for that was to respond to the federal program, but also because there was a sense of urgency from the situation in the housing market. HRM was trying to strike a balance between responding to the crisis while still giving people a chance to provide meaningful input and I think we did that. For my part, I wrote a dedicated blog post that went out to my e-newsletter list (1,300) as well as being shared ons social media, and I followed up with an article in my print newsletter advising of the changes that went to every door in District 5. Councillor Mason took the same approach over in Halifax and there was also the HRM generated outreach.

In total, there were over 700 hundred submissions from the public and staff made changes as a result, such as lowering the proposed height limit on Victoria Road from 7 storeys to 5 storeys (still an increase from the original Centre Plan). Council also made changes to the proposal in advance of the public hearing at first reading. This planning changes weren’t cast in stone. They did change based on public feedback. HRM was well setup here in other ways because of all the work that went into the Centre Plan and Regional Plan Review. I don’t think we could have carried off this kind of work without answering a lot of the big picture vision questions through the Centre Plan first.

Federal Money
The last comment that came up a lot during the public hearing, both from those in favour and those against, that I want to address was that HRM was being bribed by the federal government to make planning changes. It was either “don’t let the federal money undermine our plans” or “I can’t believe you have to be bought to overcome NIMBY objections.” Neither interpretation is true.

For starters, a lot of what was approved was already being contemplated through the Regional Plan Review. Council had already approved motions from Councillor Mason seeking additional gentle density in the Regional Centre before the Housing Accelerator program even existed! If all HRM was interested in was the federal money, when Minister Fraser wrote the municipality with his requested amendments, we would have just said yes. Instead, HRM wrote the Minister back saying “we think we can do better than what you’re asking, give us time to go look at potential amendments.” The feds agreed and the result were proposals that actually went further than what the Minister asked for.

What Council approved is a made in HRM approach, produced by our expert staff and modified based on resident and Council feedback. It’s a sincere attempt to respond to the housing crisis we find ourselves in. If it was just being brought forward to cravenly seek federal money, we wouldn’t have gone through all this extra work or gone further than the feds asked. We went further because everyone was convinced it was the right thing to do.

So was the federal program a meaningless gift to HRM for things that we were going to do anyway? No. What the federal program did was focus efforts. I don’t think HRM would have had the same haste without the federal incentives and the federal dollars will produce ongoing benefits to the planning process as they allow HRM to make improvements to things like permit timelines. The federal program didn’t buy a zoning outcome, what it bought was speed and focus, and what it will continue to buy is ongoing planning process improvements.

The Post Development
From big picture planning to a very important, but site-specific development. Earlier in May, Harbour East Community Council approved the redevelopment of the old Dartmouth Post Office. The Post Office development had to come to Council in the old pre-Centre Plan type format because it involves a registered heritage building. The project will see a 25 storey tower built on the Post Office’s parking lot, while the original Post Office building will be restored, but otherwise will be left as is. This is one of the best developments that I have seen in my entire time on Council. I’m very excited for how this will turn out and what it will bring to Downtown Dartmouth.

So what does The Post get right? First, it lets the Post Office be itself. When Council registered the Post Office as a heritage building prior to its sale, I expected that whoever bought the property would want to turn it into a facade and build on top of it. That’s not how things have played out. Instead, the developer has placed all of the new density on the parking lot. The original Post Office is being left to be itself.

The developer isn’t skimping on the building’s restoration either, as the stones have been painstakingly cleaned and restored, and the inside gutted down to the old brick walls. Most developers would wait for approval of the entire project before getting such extensive and expensive work started, but that’s not the case here. Without an approval for the tower even granted, the developer immediately started the heritage work. The developer’s design and actions show a great deal of care and commitment for the Post Office’s heritage.

The Post Office was designed to be a prominent government building and it’s set well-back from the property line to create a large plaza space out front. That fit its function as a government building, but for a private property owner looking to maximize space, it’s a lot of land to give up. I expected that a future developer of the Post Office would want to fill in the extra space along Queen Street, but that’s not what will happen. The new development will actually match the generous Post Office setbacks the whole length of Queen Street, creating a wide public space with landscaping, public art, and seating. It’s a tremendous gift back to Queen Street and Downtown Dartmouth.

The Post redevelopment is also doing right by some key pieces of built heritage that are truly unique to the Post Office site: the war memorial and the clock. Being the main government building in Downtown Dartmouth, the Post Office is home to Dartmouth’s original World War One memorial. As part of the redevelopment, the memorial plaque will be cleaned up and reinstated alongside the sidewalk along Queen Street, just down from where it is now. Similarly, as some folks know, the Post Office once had a clock tower. The tower was removed in 1977 due to structural issues, but the original clock was saved by the City of Dartmouth. HRM and developer have reached a deal that will see the municipality lend the developer the clock so that it can be installed at street level. The clock won’t just be a memento either, it’ll be made to work again. The clock is returning to its original home.

There was some discussion between staff and the developer and at Council about whether the tower itself should be rebuilt. The cost of putting a tower back on the Post Office would be considerable and the resulting space would have no functional purpose. I would be more inclined to push for the tower to be reinstated if the folks who removed it in 1977 hadn’t done such a great job. When you look at the Post Office building today, you would never know that it once had a tower because the stonework was matched so well. Since it would be hugely expensive, result in no useful space, and since the original tower’s removal was done so well, I think we’re better off accepting the clock being reinstated as a separate piece down at street-level where it will end up being more visible and prominent than it would ever be in the sky above.

Ferry Disruptions
Council did pass a motion of mine requesting a staff report on ferry staffing levels. For anyone who uses transit, it’s no secret that the ferry hasn’t been as reliable as it should be lately. The service is short-staffed and, from what I have heard informally, staff are burnt out and no longer willing to work the overtime that they once did to fill gaps. That combined with a few vacancies means that when someone calls in sick, HRM is stuck cancelling service, often without much notice. This is an unacceptable situation. If we expect people to make transit their preferred option for getting around, the service needs to be reliable and it simply hasn’t been lately. Council is seeking a report on current staffing levels so that we can have the full picture of how we got into this place and options as to what to do.

It might seem like a simple question with a simple answer of “hire more people,” but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Should we hire more full-time crew or seek to expand the reserve pool? If we’re hiring more full-time, should we look at adding extra service as well? Would adding more crew solve the reliability issue and also allow for the long-asked for ability to scale up more easily for special events like Pride and Canada Day? Are ferry jobs still an attractive position or are we having trouble filling vacancies? What are the contract implications and what’s the union’s position? Will more money need to be budgeted for or can the expense be absorbed into the existing budget? All good questions that will need some thought. Staff aren’t waiting for the report to work on filling current vacancies, but this is an area where I think management needs to explain how this situation arose, and we need to think a bit more broadly about what we want to do with the service to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Marketing Levy Fines
On October 1 last year, it became mandatory for short-term rental operators to start paying the HRM Destination Marketing Levy. Unfortunately, when the Province changed the legislation to make the marketing levy apply to short-term rental operators, it missed doing the obvious thing of requiring platforms, like Air BNB, to collect the marketing levy. The result is short-term rental operators have to report results and remit the marketing levy directly to HRM. HRM amended to marketing levy last year to make the changes official, which included a $25 a day fine for failing to report.

In rolling out the new bylaw, there seems to have been challenges in communicating to registered short-term rental operators that they have to submit reports each month, even if they have no income to report. HRM has no way to know if a short-term rental was active or not, meaning that the municipality needs operators to report, even if they had no bookings. This requirement doesn’t seem to have been understood since just 56% of operators submitted reports on time in October. By the time HRM sent out reminders, fines had quickly grown to hundreds of dollars. Of folks fined, 72% were operators who actually had $0 to report. It’s completely disproportionate to charge someone who is renting out their primary residence for a few days or weeks a year $100s in fines for failing to report $0 in activity. There was no ill-intent by folks to evade paying the levy, it was simply people didn’t know and by the time they were reminded of the new requirement, they had already run up large fines.

Council recognized the disproportionate nature of the fines and the problems in communicating the requirements of new bylaw and approved changes to the Marketing Levy Bylaw to waive fines for anyone who had $0 in income to report for this 2023/2024 fiscal year. Council also delegated authority to the municipal treasurer to allow for fine reductions and forgiveness in other situations. The mess wasn’t HRM’s finest moment, but I think the fix is reasonable given the circumstances.

The really good news is this whole problem will be going away as the Province amended legislation in the spring to require short-term rental providers, such as Air BNB, to collect the marketing levy on the municipality’s behalf at the point of sale. When the Provincial legislation becomes law, small-scale operators won’t have to worry about submitting reports to HRM anymore and HRM won’t have to manually run over 2,000 individual calculations. The levy will be handled by the providers, as is the case in many other places, making life easier for everyone!