Agenda, January 27
LakeWatchers
Council received its first detailed report into results from the LakeWatchers program. The Program launched in 2022 and involves sampling lake water in 79 lakes across HRM twice a year. Samples are collected by consultants and community groups. With two seasons worth of data now collected, some trends are emerging around the pressures facing HRM’s lakes: nutrients, and salt
Nutrients
Nutrient loading is a concern because excess nutrients degrade the aquatic environment, encourage excessive plant growth, and leads to deteriorating water quality. Nutrients enter lakes in rainfall and through runoff. Urban areas tend to have higher nutrient levels than undeveloped areas because:
(1) Urban areas have more impervious surfaces leading to more runoff, which is often channelled directly into lakes
(2) Human activity such as development, fertilizing lawns, salting roads, and not cleaning-up pet waste increases nutrient levels, and
(3) Urban development often removes or shrinks natural filters like wetlands and forests.
Nutrient loading is measured by looking at phosphorous and chlorophyl levels, both of which can be used to define a lake’s nutrient status (oligotrophic, meso-trophic, and eutrophic. Eutrophic lakes are rich in nutrients while oligotrophic lakes are nutrient poor). Lakes in HRM are believed to have been naturally oligotrophic, but LakeWatchers reveals that many of them are becoming increasingly nutrient rich.
By chlorophyl levels, most of HRM’s lakes are showing a transition to more nutrient rich mesotrophic states. This squares with first-hand observations from residents around the growth of aquatic plants and measurements of oxygen levels in HRM’s lakes during the summer. Phosphorous levels were less than expected, and were more supportive of oligotrophic conditions. Staff are of the opinion, given first-hand observations around plant growth and the increasing development pressures in many watersheds, that the chlorophyl data better captures what is happening in HRM’s lakes.
Salt
Unfortunately, it’s not just nutrients that are burdening HRM’s lakes. HRM’s lakes are also getting increasingly salty. Our lakes are estimated to have a natural salt concentration of around 10 mg/L, but results at many lakes greatly exceed that. The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment sets a long-term chloride exposure limit of 120 mg/L and, unfortunately, nine HRM lakes exceed these chloride limits on an ongoing basis (both summer and spring samples).
Unfortunately, Dartmouth’s urban lakes are at the top of the salt impacted list, including Banook/Micmac, Oathill, and Penhorn. Given the consistently high salt content in lakes like Banook, staff expect that impacts on the ecosystem are already occurring. There is also a vicious feedback loop in our lake environment that further amplifies the negative impacts of salt. Excessive chlorides leads to more intense seasonal stratification. More stratified lakes end up with a cold, salty, bottom layer which doesn’t mix with the warmer upper layer, leading to the bottom becoming oxygen deprived. The lack of oxygen in the water allows nutrients that are encapsulated in the lakebed to leach out into the water column, leading to even further nutrient enrichment.
The net impact of salt and excess nutrients are lakes that aren’t as healthy, have weakened ecosystems and are ultimately less useful for all of us as places for recreation.
Solutions
So what can we do about this? There are no quick or simple fixes. Broadly speaking, HRM can better manage stormwater and try to further reduce salt usage on streets that flow into our lakes.
Staff will be returning to Council early this year with a review of HRM’s Winter Operations, which Council was told will include examining salt usage. There are alternatives to road salt, but they come with trade-offs around cost and effectiveness. In District 5, there is an ad hoc approach on Lorne Avenue that has been in place for many years now where sand is used instead of salt to try and reduce the flow of salt into Oathill Lake (one of the nine lakes in HRM with excessively high chloride levels). While sanding Lorne Avenue has undoubtedly had some benefit to Oathill Lake, I have also recently heard from local residents who have asked that HRM return to salting the street because the sand is less effective. Rather than one-off decision about salting or sanding Lorne Avenue, HRM needs to adopt a consistent approach for streets that drain into our urban lakes, especially the ones that are taking in more salt than they can flush out.
The other thing that HRM can do is change how the municipality manages runoff. The old approach to managing stormwater was to get it off the land and streets as quickly as possible. This often meant a pipe directly from road to lake. You can see this very clearly all along Prince Albert Road where catch basins flow directly into Banook. Over time, we’ve come to learn that a more natural approach is a much better way to manage stormwater.
The focus today is around holding runoff on the land, and slowing runoff down. This allows the land and plants to filter out pollutants and nutrients. HRM has piloted a few alternative approaches, including on Prince Albert Road where a rain garden was installed in the triangle of land formed by Prince Albert, Sinclair, and Rixdale when the road was rebuilt in 201_. Water coming down Sinclair now goes into the rain garden instead of directly into Banook, allowing natural processes to absorb nutrients and pollutants. We’re going to need more approaches like this!
Greening our stormwater is something I have been passionate about, pushing to get the Prince Albert Road raingarden off the ground in the first place. I also have an outstanding motion on launching a retrofit program as HRM needs to move from pilots like Prince Albert Road to an ongoing program. Staff’s recommendation around LakeWatchers builds on the upcoming report on salt usage and my outstanding motion on a retrofit program by recommending that HRM further expand naturalization initiatives in HRM parks that border lakes and explore green infrastructure solutions. There will be a cost to all of this, but it’s something we will have to prioritize. Our lakes are part of our quality of life. Dartmouth is the City of Lakes. We can’t become the City of Dead Lakes.
Besides HRM’s efforts, individual residents can help improve the health of our lakes by making changes at home. Everyone can help by limiting lawn and garden fertilizer, cleaning up after pets, limiting the frequency or cleaner used when washing cars, directing run-off into raingardens, and minimizing salt usage on driveways and walkways as much as possible. If you’re fortunate enough to own lake frontage, but have grass right down to the water’s edge, you could also restore a natural buffer to slow and filter runoff on your property. HRM has a key role to play, but we can all help improve the health of our lakes.
Bike Network Revisions
Staff were back before Council with a response to Councillor Mancini’s motion to look at options to reduce the cost of HRM’s bike network. The bike network is currently 59% complete and, when finished, will provide a network of connected infrastructure in Halifax and Dartmouth where there is the greatest potential usage.
Unfortunately, the project has been long delayed and costs have increased due to increasing design complexity and because the cost of everything HRM does has increased significantly since COVID. The result is the total project costs increased from $25 million in to $85 million over the last eight years. The Federal and Provincial governments are helping HRM fund the bike network with a contribution of $20,000,000, but like all funding commitments from other orders of government, changing costs are 100% HRM’s problem. Funding from other orders of government never gets adjusted upwards. Windsor Exchange, Bedford Ferry, the Bike Network, etc. It’s an ongoing problem!
Bikes seem to be part of a sort of broader culture war and politicians, at times, have used this for some pretty divisive politics. The interference in municipal jurisdiction to block and micromanage bike projects by Provincial governments in Ontario, Alberta and here in Nova Scotia is a good example of this!
And so HRM’s bike network has been under heightened scrutiny ever since Mayor Fillmore tried to get Council to pause all active projects back in June. Council didn’t support the Mayor’s proposal to pause everything and throw the construction season into chaos, but we did support a motion from Councillor Mancini to have staff look at all upcoming projects to identify potential cost-savings. Staff’s response to Councillor Mancini’s motion was back before Council, and the biggest cost savings on the list was a potential change in Dartmouth North.
In Dartmouth North, the goal is to connect the existing active transportation bridge over the Circ alongside Burnside Drive to the rest of the network. The approved plan is to connect Slayter Street’s local bikeway and the Wyse Road bike lane to Burnside via Farrell Street/Victoria Road and Highfield Park Drive. Staff identified an option to shave over $3 million dollars by converting the protected bike infrastructure planned for Highfield Park Drive and Victoria Road into a local street bikeway on Jackson Road and Leaman Drive. On paper, this looks innocuous, but the proposed change misses some fundamental realities about the community, how it will grow in the future, and it is ultimately a pennywise but pound-foolish idea.
The challenge with going with Jackson rather than Highfield is the greatest population density is on Highfield. To get the most out of transportation projects, we should locate them where they serve the most people. This is true for both transit and active transportation. In Dartmouth North, Highfield more densely populated relative to Jackson Road right now and that difference will only grow in the future. The zoning for Highfield Park allows for much more density meaning that over time there will be even more people living in this area while Jackson Road is zoned much more conservatively. Moving the bike lanes out of Highfield Park would save some money, but make for a less effective project.
Thankfully Council agreed with me and voted to keep the current plan for protected bike lanes on Highfield 11-5. Council did approve the other cost-cutting measures on Novalea Drive and Welsford Street, reducing the cost of the bike network by $1,716,000. Staff will examine the more longer-term bike projects in the 2028-2029 timeline for similar savings.
One thing to note. There are definitely options to cut costs on the bike project, but they’re politically impossible right now. HRM could, for example, instead of building a bike path up the median of University Avenue, repurpose existing road space. That would shave millions off the estimated cost of that project, but it would involve removing curbside parking, something the current Provincial government would never allow. At the Macdonald Bridge, instead of a costly ramp, HRM could cut a hole in the fence and install a traffic light to allow bikes to proceed up North Street, but that would mean vehicles heading towards Downtown would sometimes have to stop for bike traffic. The point is that what sometimes seems like millions being spent on bikes is actually millions being spent to avoid impacts to vehicle traffic.
One-HRM Membership
A motion of mine was back before Council with a staff report: the potential for a single membership for all Parks and Rec facilities. The idea is to make Parks and Rec operate more like a private-sector gym chain where a membership to a facility like the Zatzman Sportsplex is also a membership for HRM’s other facilities like the Canada Games Centre, Sackville Sports Stadium, Cole Harbour Place, etc.
To assess the potential for a one-membership program, HRM completed a public survey The survey was well-received, generating almost 2,000 responses. Responses were almost equally split between people who had a membership at an existing Parks and Rec facility and folks who didn’t. The survey indicates that most people have a primary facility that they use, but that they use other locations a few times a year. People liked the idea of having access to other HRM facilities, but given that most didn’t see using another location frequently, most weren’t very keen on paying much of a premium for a one HRM membership.
Given the public feedback, launching a one-membership in HRM would be complicated. HRM manages Sackville Sports Stadium directly, but the municipality’s other major facilities are all managed by community groups, which means that membership pricing varies considerably across HRM.
Unless HRM reduces membership prices to the lowest existing price, someone would end up paying more, but if HRM adjusted pricing down to the lowest existing price, the result would be a financial shortfall to HRM. In light of our current budget pressures, absorbing the cost of cutting membership costs would be hard.
Given the public’s response to the survey and HRM’s own challenges with implementing a one-membership system, staff recommended that we instead implement a low-cost daypass system for folks with memberships. What it means is if you’re a member at the Sportsplex, you’ll be able to buy a daypass at other HRM facilities for 75% discount.
When I put forward the a one-membership motion, a discounted daypass program wasn’t what I was expecting the outcome to be, but I think it makes sense for now: it lines up with the public feedback, it doesn’t cost HRM more to implement, and it’s readily doable right now. HRM will also be able to track the sale of discounted daypasses, which will let us know more definitively what the actual demand for access to multiple facilities is. The one-membership report was approved unanimously on the consent agenda.
Ride Share Regulations
The item on Council’s agenda that might have received the most media interest were potential changes to the taxi and ride share bylaw. When HRM allowed ride share in HRM back in 2020, the rules that were adopted were very different for taxis compared to ride share companies. HRM allowed ride share companies to manage their own drivers, putting the responsibility of completing criminal record screening on the company. For the taxi industry, drivers are licensed by HRM. The other big difference is that Taxi fares have remained tightly regulated, whereas ride share companies get to set all of their own pricing.
As staff have been assessing how things have operated since, the feedback has been that it hasn’t been a fair competition between the more heavily-regulated taxi industry and the less regulated ride share companies. In an effort to level the playing field, HRM staff proposed that HRM license drivers for ride share companies and that the taxi industry be allowed to vary fares more dynamically.
Most of the attention on this topic focused on licensing ride share drivers, with Uber launching a campaign to get Council to drop the idea. They were fairly successful as it turns out as Mayor Fillmore put forward a motion to instead further engage with ride share companies on future changes. I voted in favour of staff’s original recommendation.
I voted to have HRM license drivers because:
(1) There is more than one ride share company operating in HRM now, which means that if Uber removes a driver from their pool, there is nothing to stop that driver from applying to drive for Lyft or Uride. In comparison, an HRM taxi driver that has lost their license can’t turnaround and drive for another company.
(2) If drivers are licensed, they would have more independence since they can take that license and easily move between companies. Given how poorly rideshare drivers are often treated, giving them more independence is a positive.
(3) The cost to drivers, $135 every two years, isn’t nothing, but it would also be the lowest cost of all their expenses in operating a rideshare vehicle by a wide margin. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable sum to cover the cost of licensing.
(4) When profit comes up against the rules, people don’t always opt to follow the rules. This isn’t a rideshare specific problem, it’s a human weakness that repeats itself time and time again. Trust, but verify is generally the better approach as people don’t always follow the rules. HRM having more oversight of who is driving isn’t a bad thing.
A majority of Council, however, bought into the Mayor’s motion. The recommendation to license rideshare drivers failed 5-11 (Cleary, Morse, White, Hendsbee and myself voted in favour). Where this goes after more discussion between HRM and the rideshare companies? I really don’t know, but for now, taxi fares are increasing and the taxi companies are getting more autonomy to adjust prices, but rideshare rules remain as is.
Other:
- Designated 1530 Oxford Street as a heritage property
- Provided an exemption to the Noise Bylaw for the Dalhousie Student Union’s Sno-Fest
- Agreed to an encroachment license with Downtown Halifax for a new welcome sign at the Cogswell
- Approved an amendment to HRM’s agreement with the Housing Trust of Nova Scotia regarding a grant provided to the Trust for the purchase of several apartment buildings in 2022 to align HRM and Canada Mortagage and Housing Corporation program criteria around affordable housing
- Established a governance framework around the police department’s special investigations reserve
- Adopted amendments to the grant program for secondary units to allow for a longer intake period
- Adopted amendments to Administrative Order 1 to require Auditor General Recommendations to return to Council for review at fixed intervals
- Awarded 16 grants in HRM’s Anti-Black Racism program
- Requested staff report (1) on strengthening enforcement of policies around vicious dogs, (2) directing funds from the landfill community integration towards a community beautification project in Goodwood, (3) on the effectiveness of HRM’s blasting bylaw, and (4) on a policy for established HRM Comfort Centres
- Waived the requirement for a staff report to provide an African Nova Scotia affirmation at all Council meetings during the month of February and requested a report on amending Administrative Order 1 to make the practice permanent beyond 2026
- Waived the requirement for a staff report to change the word “citizen” to “resident” in HRM’s strategic plan
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