Council Update: Ferry Fares, Dartmouth Cove Development Charges, Affordable Housing

Agenda, May 26

Ferry Fare Forgiveness
The major item for District 5 was a motion I put forward to waive fares on the Alderney Ferry on weekdays for the month of June. My reason for the motion is because of the continued breakdown in service on the Alderney route that now far exceeds any kind of routine disruption.

HRM has a fleet of five ferries and needs four on weekdays to deliver all the planned service. The fifth ferry is meant to be a spare so that vessels can rotate in and out for maintenance. Work has been underway on the Craig Blake for several months now, meaning HRM has been without a spare. We’ve had no backup for the unexpected and, unfortunately, the unexpected struck in catastrophic fashion when the steering system on the Vincent Coleman failed in January. The steering system on the ferries is specialized equipment. It’s not something you can buy at Home Depot! The technology is proprietary and replacement parts can only be purchased from the manufacturer, who no longer has operations in North America. Replacement parts come from Europe. HRM does keep replacement parts on hand, but the replacement stock had been exhausted and so there was no way to quickly get the Coleman back into operation. Without the Blake and the Coleman, Transit had to reduce service on the Alderney route from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.

At the start of last week, it finally looked like smooth sailing ahead as the parts finally arrived and the Coleman was brought back into service. The good news lasted just two days though as on Thursday, the Christopher Stannix suffered the same sort of steering system failure. Transit had already ordered more replacement parts, but the Stannix didn’t wait for these backup parts to arrive. HRM has been told the parts are on their way, so it hopefully won’t be as long a wait to fix the Stannix, but no one anticipated the Coleman being out of commission for as long as it was either. We will have to wait and see!

There are big picture issues around ferry operations to consider here. The good news on that is that HRM already had a third-party review underway, which is scheduled to come before Council on June 23. I have had the chance to meet with the consultants to provide feedback into the report and I emphasized the issues we’ve been having over the last several years around reliability in terms of parts and labour. Both are part of the review’s scope and I understand there will be recommendations for Council to consider. Whatever comes out of the review is likely to require change over multiple years. Changing systems isn’t easy or quick! This is the big picture stuff.

Although there is a broader review of ferry operations underway, that doesn’t change that in the here and now, the loss of 15 minute service on the Alderney Ferry is upending people’s daily lives. The ferry’s reputation has taken a hit and I would be shocked if ridership hasn’t been declining as a result of the service reduction. I have certainly heard from more than one person who has referenced that they’ve started driving to Halifax instead. The thing about people is our routines are sticky. Once we form new ones, they can become our new normal and can be difficult to reset. The person who starts driving, and buys a parking pass Downtown may just continue doing that, even after ferry service is back to normal. There has been nothing in the last few months that says to folks “trust us, you can base your life around this service being here.”

In the past, like after the 2012 transit strike, HRM has waived fares in situations where transit service has been significantly impacted. In Council’s debate on my motion, the Director of Transit referenced such initiatives as being aimed at generating good will and showing understanding to riders. The Alderney Ferry has been operating at 50% of its normal service for five months now and counting. Five months! This isn’t in anyway a comparable service disruption to the kind of thing transit contends with on a daily basis across the network that some of my colleagues referenced, like overcrowding or traffic delays in rush hour. Those are important problems and Council has been working on that (decision to buy additional buses in this year’s budget, my motion on prioritizing transit in the road network), but what’s going on with the Alderney Ferry is in a whole other league. Council needs to take the big picture review seriously, but I also think that there needs to be some acknowledgement to the public that reflects the gravity of the current situation. 50% service loss every weekday for five months is far and beyond a normal service disruption. A PSA that says sorry doesn’t cut it at this point. Waiving fares is what HRM could do in the here and now. The cost was estimated at $8,000 per weekday, so $176,000 for the month of June.

Although I think there is a good case to do something outside the norm given the scale and the length of time that the Alderney Ferry has been running at half its normal service, my Council colleagues, mostly, didn’t agree. My motion to waive weekday fares for June was defeated 3-11. Myself, Mancini, and Morse voted in favour, the rest voted against (Councillors St. Amand, Kent, Cleary were absent). Hopefully the parts coming from Europe will arrive soon, be complete, and not get held up in customs.

Dartmouth Cove Development Charges
Council approved revisions to the Dartmouth Cove Development Fee Bylaw. This covers the underused industrial lands on Canal and Skokomul Street. It doesn’t include the controversial waterlot properties to the east that have generated so much attention over the last few years! This isn’t that Dartmouth Cove!

When the Centre Plan was completed, the properties on the other side of the CN rail tracks (Smithers and Dominion Diving) were given very little development rights. The reason was previous policy direction to preserve marine industrial lands and the CN tracks as barriers to redevelopment. Preserving marine industrial is important, but I also think the planning direction for Dartmouth Cove has largely been set by previous planning work, and the approval of King’s Wharf. Restricting redevelopment at the end of Skokomul and Canal with the idea that this should continue to be marine industrial doesn’t make much sense given the direction that has already been set. At the time though, HRM punted a decision on this to the future.

The future arrived a bit earlier than anyone might have expected though as, in response to the housing crisis, HRM made amendments to the Centre Plan, which included the waterfront properties in Dartmouth Cove (Smithers and Dominion). The result was the waterfront lands in Dartmouth Cove gained much more development rights, going from a floor area ratio of 1.0 to 4.0. How does this relate back to Dartmouth Cove’s development charges? To redevelop Dartmouth Cove, the land needs to be raised and new street infrastructure needs to be built. There is a cost to HRM in doing that. HRM is splitting that cost 50/50 with property owners. The total estimated cost to property owners, collectively, is $5,876,000, which is up slightly from earlier estimates of $5,500,000.

The $5,500,000 in the original bylaw was divided up between all properties based on their potential development rights. Properties with more potential density pay more as they have more capacity to absorb the expense. HRM recovers the costs when property’s are redeveloped. Since property owners costs were calculated on their potential development rights based on the original Centre Plan, the waterfront properties were assigned a very small percentage of the total because in the original plan, they didn’t have much redevelopment potential. With the changes through the Housing Accelerator, however, that is no longer the case and so the development charge calculations needed to be updated. Without the bylaw being updated, waterfront developers would essentially gain additional development rights without having to pay a corresponding increased share of the infrastructure costs. They would effectively be unfairly subsidized by the land side developers who would pay more for the same development rights.

The Mayor had an issue with this, citing development fees as impacting the cost of housing. The mayor isn’t wrong in that development fees are part of the cost of housing and so there is a balance in setting fees that are reasonable. I don’t think this was applicable in the changes being proposed at Dartmouth Cove though as the total difference in costs to developers compared to previous calculations was, collectively, a tiny $376,000. Spreading that $376,000 across all the potential units that could be built in Dartmouth Cove is barely a rounding error. The real guts of the bylaw change was redistributing the cost amongst the property owners to fairly reflect the planning changes that were made. This wasn’t about new costs, it was about being fair to all property owners in Dartmouth Cove. Council approved the motion 13-1 with the Mayor being the only no vote.

Other

• Directed staff to schedule a future public hearing to consider the sale of 48 Pinecrest Drive to Rooted Nova Scotia so that the land can be redeveloped for affordable housing
• Registered 2636 Windsor Street, Halifax as a heritage propert
• Approved a flypast during SailGP
• Approved a transfer of park land in Timberlea to the Province as part the construction of a new school
• Approved the public participation program for the planning strategy reviews for Lucasville and Hammonds Plains
• Directed the CAO to enter into a contribution agreement with the Prospect Road and Area Recreation Association for community beautification projects in Goodwood (this from funds that
• Gave first reading to new ice rental rates (I was the sole no vote to this as I would have preferred a more staggered increase in fees)
• Approved amendments to the Investment Policy for managing HRM’s cash reserves
• Approved special events grants
• Since the Mayor and Deputy Mayor are both away in June for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Conference, Council delegated the Deputy Mayor role to the last Deputy Mayor, Tony Mancini
• Authorized Deputy Mayor Patty Cuttell to speak on HRM’s behalf at the Strong Cities Network in New York City (no cost to HRM)