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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!