HRM Wants to Expand the Bureaucracy
 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...yees-1.5978714


A very poor idea. The deed transfer tax bump is a windfall that may not continue in future years. But adding staff is an expense that will go for decades. HRM has a huge bureaucracy already with lots of fat to trim, but Dube wants to make it even fatter.

Why shouldn't they? The city is growing; that requires more people to get things done.

The planning department has a ton of plans that need to be updated and not enough staff to do it. The more they fall behind the worse it gets. We also have a real need for aggressive efforts to get ahead of transportation planning rather than being reactive.

How so? Don't want we want to get approvals through faster?

Do we know if that is what is going to happen though? In my experience, more bureaucrats frequently means more levels of organization, resulting in a stultification in the process before the person who actually makes decisions sees the files. Bureaucratic inertia and paralysis is frequently the result.......

Very small-town thinking if you think 15 employees is going to slow things down and make things 'bureaucratic'. At some point administration has to grow with the city.

My experience is mostly with the RHAs in NB. Believe me, things are way more bureaucratic than they used to be.

I used to be the chief of my department back when the Moncton Hospital was an independent facility. If I had a problem, all I had to do was wander down the hallway to talk to the VP responsible for my department, and he would say "let me see what I can do about that". He was invariably very helpful.

Now the Moncton Hospital is a cog in a provincewide RHA, and there are quite literally four different levels of management that have to be navigated before a request reaches anyone with any decision making power. The people who make the decisions are so far removed from the problems that they have very little idea about the consequences of their decisions and are shielded from any meaningful feedback. It's a horrible and demoralizing situation. :(

I'm not sure that I would qualify simply hiring more employees as "expanding the bureaucracy". Sounds like they just want more hands to do the work more quickly, rather than adding extra layers of bureaucracy to slow things down.

Actually, it sounds positive, like Halifax is growing and needs more help to keep up with all the work coming through the department...

My brother in Halifax is right in the middle of the scenario you describe. He is developing a tool that will help Nurses save their backs and has satisfied numerous regulatory ,funding, and patent process's. Literally about 15 hurdles have been jumped but NSH may be a hill too tall to climb. The Empires will be protected.

I think that you only have to look out of your window at all of the construction going on. Everything from a small residential addition to a new apartment building. New infrastructure including roads, transit and park dedications.

I read today that 10 positions are currently held by people on temporary contracts. This bump "in bureaucracy" is really only attributed to making these staff permanent.

That being said,...the article mentioned that there are 204 staff reports outstanding. I always recalled how quick councillors were to send something to staff for a report. Perhaps, councillors are a little too report-happy.

We talk here all the time about how slow and generally awful the planning approval process is. THAT is why things get backlogged and take so long. Fix THAT, and let the existing staff move things through with some urgency. And let them stop the endless open houses, drop-ins, planning surveys, etc etc.

This is why Centre Plan is SO important, and why everyone on this board should support it, even if it isn't perfect. Centre Plan is the fix for the slow approvals process. Development agreements as an approval process can only go so fast. Yes, HRM is definitely the slowest in NS when it comes to development agreements, but that's not entirely unreasonsonable given how much higher the stakes and public awareness are here compared to small municipalities.

EDIT: It's also why it's so important for HRM to get the teams in place to modernize the rest of the planning documents ASAP. So much time is wasted because the plans are grossly out-of-date, so any modern development requires a change to the plan, which is considered a major undertaking with onerous process requirements. This is painful to applicants, and it's a drag on HRM resources (preventing them from proactively keeping the plans up-to-date).

But as has been said here numerous times, I am led to believe Centre Plan is only a framework as of a moment in time, and developers are expected to submit proposals that will require amendments or variances from its overly restrictive and prescriptive absolutes. So what is the point of it all?

Well, at least this latest application is not asking for any variances: https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default...0414dac911.pdf

No we don't need more mandarins, we need to abolish the Byzantine zoning and bylaws that extort money from developers. The zoning and bylaws are on purpose designed to be draconian, to act as leverage for extortion. So that nothing can get built unless developers bribe the council with money for their pet projects. Example: last year a developer wanted to build a hotel, but building anything in HRM is basically illegal, so he had to beg the city for a permit, so Mason demanded the hotel include a "First Nations Art Gallery." Then Mason demanded that the Gallery has to be run by a artist of the Council's choosing, who gets to dictate what artist's get featured in the gallery. The developer walked away because this is friggin ridiculous who would want to have to deal with this bullshit? I'm planning to be building a hotel but now I'm building a First Nations art gallery for Waye Mason's buddies, and I won't own it, and I won't control it, and I'm probably going to get called racist. This is the kind of dictatorship the Council is.