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Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update | News | Halifax, Nova Scotia

Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update | News | Halifax, Nova Scotia

Halifax’s city council is meeting on Tuesday, Jan 14, and the agenda is pretty interesting. In addition to the stuff they’ll debate, there is a written report updating council on the progress of Halifax’s strategic plans. The city’s bureaucracy seems to really be struggling with implementing its strategic plans. Of the council’s priorities that were tracked, only 66% were trending in the right direction (46) or flat-lining (10). Fully a third of council priorities, 34%, are trending in the wrong direction (29). Of the bureaucracy’s administrative priorities, 82% were trending in the right direction (9) or flat-lining (5), and 18% are heading in the wrong direction (3).

The city has been trying to improve its strategic planning and does seem to be getting better, but the reality of the situation might be a bit more dire than the strategic plan update indicates. Because the city of Halifax has a very long history of bad strategic planning.

For example, the city will sometimes pass a strategic plan, like the Green Network Plan, but then not change bylaws to ensure that plan is enacted, like they’re legally obligated to do by the charter. However, in November 2024 we learned that the Green Network Plan has been held up by Annapolis Group suing the city for “defacto expropriation.” The Supreme Court decided that zoning something for a non-money-making future use hurt developers’ future profits, and the city would be liable for all that lost potential profit. Unless the province gives the city immunity from this type of lawsuit, Annapolis Group’s profit motive and a slim majority of Supreme Court justices have killed the Green Network Plan. A report coming back to council sometime Soon should shed some light on this strategic plan’s future.

This lack-of-action pattern also puts other strategic plans at risk, including HalifACT, Halifax’s flagship climate plan. It’s so important to the council that we’ve levied an additional tax to ensure it’s funded. However, like the Green Network Plan, the city didn’t attach the planning to outcomes to actionable policy, and now HalifACT is “at risk” of failing due to slow and inadequate implementation.

After a Halifax Transit fuel spill went undetected for a year, Halifax got dinged with an audit in 2015 saying it had inadequate risk management. This spawned a flurry of bureaucratic activity, and Halifax stood up a brand-new risk management apparatus to mitigate the risks identified by the inadequate risk assessment audit. However, a 2024 audit found that Halifax still had massive issues in risk assessment not actually fixed by the attempts to do so after the 2015 audit; on top of that, the auditor general had concerns that 100% (2) of the reports they received from staff in the past five years were surface-level and inaccurate. Surface-level and inaccuracy are the most common threads in Halifax’s strategic planning.

Speaking of the auditor general’s office, those accountability superfans also audited the HRM’s efforts at diversity and inclusion last year. Any guesses on what they found? A lot of people doing a lot of work, and no way to know if that work is supporting any municipal goals. This is why, even though the city has been doing inclusion work for a while, and even though many members of the public over the years have suggested a simple way to avoid it, chairs of meetings across the HRM still butcher people’s names. The easy, no-cost fix is to get clerks to ask people to “please tell us how to phonetically pronounce your name” when confirming people’s attendance for their requests to speak. Even though we got one for this issue, there’s really no need for an AG report outlining the city’s policy failures when gazing out at the acres of low-hanging, easy-to-harvest policy fruits left to wither, unnoticed, on the vine. It’s much easier for a self-serving and lazy bureaucracy to self-report its actions as successes, which is easier to do when municipal goals are not attached to measurable outcomes.

But sometimes, even when municipal decision-making is attached to measurable outcomes, there’s no guarantee those outcomes will be achieved, or even if they are achieved, if they’ll support municipal goals. For example, the city had a goal of not killing anyone with public infrastructure and passed a robust Road Safety Framework to try and prevent extremely preventable deaths back in 2018. The city established the framework because the pre-2018 average of 14 annual road deaths was considered too high. We’re down to an average of 13 deaths annually from 2018 to 2024 (12.5 if you include 2020, 13.3 if you don’t). However, this reduction looks much higher and, therefore, much better if measured per capita, and that’s what Halifax’s new Strategic Road Safety Framework does. Although even per capita the lack of downward progress is evident.

Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update

During the Transportation Standing Committee meeting where the framework was debated, the HRM’s director of traffic management, Lucas Pitts, said Hoboken New Jersey cheated to achieve not killing anyone on public streets. He likely meant that their relatively small size made it much easier to complete sweeping systems-level changes in their approach to roads and transportation. While that explains how quickly Hoboken was able to change their whole city, the changes themselves were fast because, in their strategic plan, each action item had a timeline for implementation, a person or office responsible for implementing it, which agencies needed to or could help that office, and what the expected tangible outcome for each specific action. It’s impressive and pages long.

click to enlarge Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update

Hoboken, New Jersey

Part of page 1 of Hoboken’s safe streets plan in their version of the strategic road safety framework

Meanwhile, what does the equivalent section of our equivalent but new and improved strategic plan look like in Halifax? Vibes-based strategic planning.

click to enlarge Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update

HRM

The entirety of HRM’s “systems level” plan to safer streets

So while it is no doubt true that part of Hoboken’s success is due to the smaller size of their geography, both Hoboken and Halifax have similar powers over street designs and transportation policy. What Hoboken has that Halifax does not is an evidence-based systems-level approach to road safety: they have tangible outcomes they want to achieve, they have a strategic framework with actionable items to achieve and timelines to achieve them. This plan is being implemented by a bureaucracy demonstrating a high level of competency. Hoboken isn’t cheating; they’re just miles better than we are. They are so much better at governance that we’re not even really playing the same game. Its pros vs joes, municipal democracy edition, and we’re just being outplayed by a much better bureaucracy.

Worse, our team is blind to how badly it’s being schooled due to flaws in its own game. Take, for example, the municipal outcome of an “Affordable & Sustainable Mobility Network” which does not have sufficient information to say whether or not we have a “responsible investment approach that maximized the use of existing mobility infrastructure and aligns with climate and social equity goals.” Staff write that commute durations decreased, but that commute data was collected during the pandemic and an outlier year. Meanwhile, the number of registered vehicles has gone up by 22,000, but so too has the quality of the roads, so it’s all kind of inconclusive. Not considered, apparently, in this strategic assessment of sustainability assessment, responsible investment and maximizing the use of existing mobility infrastructure are consumer trends and the budget, which tell a very different story than not having enough information to report.

Because automotive infrastructure is so astronomically expensive, the best way to maximize the use of existing mobility infrastructure is to switch from unsustainably high-cost, inefficient infrastructure to low-cost highly efficient infrastructure. In 2022, the cost per kilometre of road in the HRM was $6,721 for each of the city’s 4,853.6 kms of roads. Two years later in 2024, the cost of each one of those kilometres has doubled to $12,366. According to the report the number of registered vehicles is going up too.

Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update

And according to the province, most of those vehicles are trucks or SUVs.

Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update

As vehicles get bigger and existing roadways become increasingly space-inefficient thanks to the increase in size and prevalence of modern monster vehicles, congestion is and will continue to get worse. With all of this knowledge one might expect the city to be investing in fiscally sustainable, lower-cost, high-efficiency transportation infrastructure, like dedicated bus and/or bike lanes.

Instead, we’re doubling down on unsustainability and doing this.

chart visualization

chart visualization

Even though there’s not enough information for staff to draw formal conclusions in the narrow scope of Halifax’s strategic planning benchmarks, there are some very clear trends in the larger picture of the municipality. It is quite alarming that the scope of reporting and evaluation of Halifax’s strategic planning is so narrow that city staff can’t tell councillors whether or not the city is sustainable, even though that’s one of council’s goals. City staff can’t even tell councillors if the city is sustainable even though there’s a mountain of municipal data suggesting the city is not. Here’s to hoping our enterprising councillors have read this update and decide put it infront of council for debate. Sustainability is one of council’s top priorities, and city staff have some serious questions to answer. If our transportation network is not sustainable, staff can’t be allowed to get away with saying they don’t know why.


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