Afleveringen
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Hey folks, bit of a lighter show notes this week because I've done a bonus show and had to put a newspaper to bed.
See ya next week, don't forget to grab a copy of the first issue of the paper this week at Atlantic News in Halifax and The Dart Gallery in Dartmouth
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Since journalism is homework the job, after last episode where I explained in great details the issues with the HRM's planning, I felt obligated to explain how I'd fix it.
For this bonus episode I invited Kevin Wilson aka HFX By Bike and the two of us work through fixing the BRT. Over on his YouTube Channel, Kevin does this sort of thing on a regular basis in his let's fix video. Recently he took a look at the Halifax Commons. Check it out:
https://youtu.be/iwIj95vOHpY?si=_mZ6A-pb-O1zzqkV
In this episode, we talk a lot about pedestrian safety, and the more you look into it, you'll realize that crosswalk safety is mostly a convenient lie. Check it out for yourself though, here's what I'm basing my opinion on:
https://ggwash.org/view/40788/traffic-engineers-still-rely-on-a-flawed-1970s-study-to-reject-crosswalks
https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/driving/article/id/28343/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847821002503
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332300079_Eye_Contact_Between_Pedestrians_and_Drivers
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0361198118790645
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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I suspect most people don't usually read the show notes, but if you're here for the study, scroll down. If you're here for information in this episode Matt Stickland, recaps council and goes deep into the weeds of Halifax's Bus Rapid Transit Plan.
Here's the promised study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920919314026?via%3Dihub
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Bit of a light week at city hall and since I forgot it was Good Friday, a bit of a lighter episode.
Councillor Janet Steele is trying to get the city to protect and create more heritage districts. Councillor Cathy Deagle Gammon is trying to remove parking spots in land use bylaws because toddlers don't drive cars.
All of that and a deep dive into the difference between Halifax's transportation planning and that of the Dutch.
Here's a link to the YouTube video referenced in the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpo98dhpgZI&t=2s
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber over at www.grandparade.news.
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Last week was a relatively slow one as far as the schedule was concerned, with only a Tuesday council meeting and Thursday’s African descent advisory committee.
Halifax now has a budget, and thanks to Mayor Andy Fillmore, next year’s budget will be wildly different from this year's. Also, last week, Halifax once again found itself standing in the long shadow of its more than slightly racist history.
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In a week dominated by breathless international news Halifax's city hall had a relatively slow week.
This week there were only two meetings of consequence, which allowed the Board of Police Commissioners to do a deep dive into intimate partner violence and the Envrionment and Sustainability Committee to learn about the failures of the green network plan.
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Now that budget season is done, as threatened, this show will now become a weekly roundup of what happened at City Hall last week. The obvious high/lowlight of last week was when council finished the budget adjustment list debates on Wednesday, March 26, but did you know that other meetings also happened last week? There was an audit that missed some key financial information, public housing grants were awarded, and next summer, there might be a bus to HRM’s beaches!
This weekly recap show takes a whirlwind rip through all of council's meetings (except budget committee) from the past week.
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Halifax's budget playoffs wrapped on Wednesday March 26 and Halifax has a budget!
The budget itself was a political victory for our new mayor, Andy Fillmore, who promised to keep Halifax’s property tax rate flat, which the council did. However, property values went up by 4.7 percent, and so will property taxes.
Those property taxes will pay for Halifax’s $1.3 billion operating budget and $318 million. Thanks to the final debate day in Halifax’s budget playoffs, we learned more about our new council's politics than we did about the budget. The city doesn’t care for its workers, but it does care for its sports heroes and biodiversity. Some rookie councillors showed some expected inexperience, and a veteran councillor earned their first wooden spoon.
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Halifax council’s budget meeting on monday March 24th was a stinker, quite literally, and also because council almost voted to make Halifax’s poorest people just a little hungrier because of how Canadian governments divvied up their power and responsibilities. But the good news is that your odds of dying in a fire are going to decrease slightly in the next few years, probably. Still, the bad news is that your taxes in five years are going to be astronomically expensive. You’re not going to get better programs and services for those crazy high taxes because that money will have to go to debt because this council just can’t stop themselves from making terrible fiscal decisions.
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It's the second intermission of the budget playoffs and a lot happened in Friday's debate. Council approved an armoured personnel carrier, the central library got it's reserves cut and council avoided making a terrible cut. All that and more in this budget playoffs' second intermission update!
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In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt flys solo to update folks on the future of the podcast and the future of Halifax's budget.
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The wait is over, it's finally here budget season started on Wednesday. In this episode Matt and Martin dive into what's being going on at city hall from strategic plans, to Windsor street exchange and of course, the start of budget season.
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This past week has been a huge one in municipal politics with Halifax's city council getting an update about how their strategic planning is going. Spoiler alert, it's going very bad. In this emergency episode, Matt and Martin break down the failures of Halifax's bureaucracy
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It's been a busy start to the new year with with a few big ticket events for the hosts Matt Stickland and Martin Baumen to break down.
The Board of Police Commissioners meeting on Wednesday, December 8th, was one of the best meetings in HRM's recent history, which included five little piggies and some light-hearted civil disobedience.
Matt's been doing a lot of research into road safety and tells Martin all about how much liability the city might have been putting itself in for the past few decades.
Also, in this episode, a Grand Parade exclusive: Did Andy Fillmore think he would win the vote to de-designate encampments? And a debute of our new segment, Question Period.
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In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt and Martin look back at the past two weeks in municipal politics and answer some hard hitting questions like: Will transit ever get better in this city? How do you cook a crow? And is there any point to the city's advisory committees?
Plus, we also have a new show format! Except for the any other business segment at the end your listening experience should be largely unchanged but we'd like any feedback if you have any. Please send it to [email protected]
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At long last Coast reporter Martin is back after his paternity leave and he joins Coast city hall reporter Matt Stickland to catch up on everything he'd missed since being out.
In this episode, the two talk about how the council is shaping up three meetings into their term. Which councillors are making mistakes? Who's looking promising?
The conversation then turns to the HRM's committees and the upcoming budget season. Matt explains why he's mostly optimistic about the city's future, even if some shakey debate performances have sown some early seeds of doubt.
All of that plus traffic planning, boomer assumptions and sneaky good provincial legislation in this first episode of Season 2 of the Grand Parade
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After an impromptu summer break the Grand Parade is back! Host Matt Stickland sits down with the owner of Atlantic New Chris Greene to talk about how to interview candidates for the upcoming fall election.
Chris will be sitting down the candidates of District 7 to interview them and find out who would be the best candidate for his district and wanted to advice.
Happy to oblige, Matt explains how he and The Coast are vetting candidates for the fall election.
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In what was supposed to be the last episode of the HFX Votes 2024 election podcast series The Coast's city hall reporter Matt Stickland sat down with The Coast’s newsletter editor Julie Lawrence to answer some listener questions.
The conversation bounces around as the two try to answer as many questions as possible. There are a bunch of simple questions like “Does Halifax have enough parking?” that have relatively simple answers like “Yes.”
But some questions sparked more interesting and nuanced conversations, like ‘Should Halifax reduce the size of its bureaucracy?’ and ‘What makes a suburb?’ There is also a definitely real award given out to the listener who asked the best question.
But this will not be the last episode in the series, I heard back from the infrastructure expert I was trying to interview, and we’re in the process of setting up the interview. So stay tuned for that in your podcast feeds.
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There are two types of people in this world. There are people who think that headline is needlessly dramatic, and then there are people who understand risk management. The Coast has covered risk management extensively since Halifax’s Auditor General released his scathing indictments of the city’s Risk Management Team, but this is one of those things that just can’t be talked about enough until the issues are fixed.
In this episode of the Grand Parade, Matt talks through his research to date from a 2014 Halifax Transit oil spill to today. The conversation covers the big things like Halifax’s risk management team being the wrong people for the job to the minutia, like taxing under-utilized parking lots near transit terminals.
The long and short of it is that this city is not taking Risk Management seriously, and your future is in jeopardy in the most boring possible way. The next crop of councillors needs to do a better job of addressing these risks, which means we need to do a better job of vetting them when they come to our doors. This, unfortunately, requires you to consume the civic education version of your least favourite vegetable and gain a baseline understanding of what risk management is and how it affects your life. You can do this by listening to the latest episode of the Grand Parade here.
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