This means my 10-15 minute essays on whatever I am thinking about on my commute to work have also returned.

After I bought my bus pass today I waited 10 minutes for the #1 bus. I sweat. A lot. So on a day that is already 24 degrees a bit humid, I decided to bus it downtown, rather than walk. Good news for all, the new hybrid buses are air conditioned!

This seems to me to be the single best piece of news on our city this summer. Very little other positive news has come out of council, and our media and civil society organizations all seem to contribute to the malaise.

Maybe it was the vacation in Italy that did it.

Tuscany is wonderful, the people enjoy life, eat well, the music is good, the quality of life high, the towns and cities are walkable, have good public transit, have great public spaces. There is a Joie de vivre in Florence all the time that I wish we had in Halifax more frequently, if at all.

Glancing over the side of the ferry just now, and more importantly, smelling the harbour, well, I wish Peter Kelly luck on his dip today. Restoring the sewage plant to functioning after years of delay in restarting a brand new system cannot be considered something to celebrate, merely ruefully acknowledge.

This ride is almost at an end, so I will cut myself off.

The next few posts will be explorations of things that have been alternating frustrating and exasperating about Halifax, things that need leadership and change.

I know this is a great city and on the balance great people live here, we just need a few unequivocal, real victories and triumphs to restore our confidence.

Hopefully we can get some leaders in place who realize hundred million dollar white elephants are not the same as real social, political and economic success.

Despite the usual mid-summer media doldrums there was still a lot of coverage of HRM By-Law trying to shut down Caribbean Twist.

The new, black owned, busy and delicious Caribbean Twist restaurant at 3081 Gottingen Street had been told that they had to close because the building was “not zoned for a restaurant.”

This is how it was presented by media but being a nerd, I know there is no specific restaurant zoning, so I started digging.  What is the real technical problem here?  Surely this building has always been commercial?  There is no difference in Commercial zoning, if you have it you can be a restaurant.  What gives?

A few weeks ago I went on Explore HRM, the website that HRM runs that lets you look up property information, such as zoning and property ID numbers.

Carribean Twist is in the old Toulany’s building facing the triangle of parkland in front of the famous  Young Street Hydrostone commercial strip.  This “british high street” was created after the 1917 Halifax Explosion leveled the North End.    This side of the park is zoned C2A, which means light commercial use.  We will get back to that in a bit.

On the other side of the park, on Kaye Street has had a mix of commercial and residential, much of which is being redeveloped right now, including the corner of Kaye and Isleville where the new glittery Starbucks has appeared in the bottom of a condo development.  This side of the trangle is zoned C2, also commercial.

Gottingen Street, between Kaye and Young, the final side of the triangle, has two buildings.  One is clearly residential, on the north side, and to the south, is the old Toulany’s building, looks like what you would expect from a 1920s commercial space.  Door on the corner, big glass windows all along the street, just like a hundred other similar buildings in Nova Scotia.

Thing is, this bit of street is zoned residential, R2, for multiple dwelling units in a small building.

So, I wondered, what the hell?

ACT II – The Twists and Turns of History (or – what was old is new, again).

The building was around 1920, the design indicates it was intended to be a store of some kind, so questions start to occur: was it commercial, if so what type of commercial was it,  and when was it zoned to residential?  What was the intention when it was built?  Well, it looked like this:

Current Caribbean Twist building looking very much like a storefront in 1921 - Gottingen and Russell Streets at Kaye Street, ca 1921 (PANS)

So first I went to the Public Archives.

PANS is great, but hard to navigate if you are not a regular. The card catalog is organized by areas of interest and other intuitive groupings that start to make sense the longer you are there.  For me, I have not been there for 15 years, so I was cursing (quietly) a provincial government that has not yet spent the money to put the damn catalog in a searchable database yet.

With staff help I made it to the microfilm, and did two things.  First I looked up the property on the earliest Insurance Survey I could find.  The 1922-1948 map looks like this:

1948 Insurance Map showing Caribbean Twist site as a restaurant. (PANS)

Yep, that’s right.  1948, and 523 (later renumbered to 905 and later renumbered to 3081 Gottingen) is noted as a “rest.”, which I suspected was short for, you guessed it, restaurant.

But business info is not what I was looking for from the map, all I wanted from the map was the old address, so I could look up the address in the old MacAlpine City Directory.

What is cool about the directory is that it said who or what was at each address, organized by street.  Today this would never get past the Privacy Commissioner but for historical research it sure comes in handy.

So I start with 1920.  Nothing.  1921.  Nothing.   1922 – bingo!  The building was two addresses, the south end where the door is now, and the north end.  In 1922 the north end of the building is listed as a “Grocery.”

Was the south end of the building empty, or was it part of the grocery?  I couldn’t tell, but I suspect that, due to the economic crash in Halifax after World War 1, that it took some time to fill all the commercial spots being built in the North End by the reconstruction efforts.

So, I started looking every 10 years, to see what changed. 1932 – grocery store still there.  By 1942 south end of the building is home to, wait for it, the Rex Café. A restaurant!  I have a sneaking suspicion the Rex was a predecessor to Garden View in Dartmouth, but that is another story.  Grocery store was still there.  By 1952 the whole building appears to be the Orchid’s Grill. In the 1960s the building has become Toulany’s  Grocery.

In 1972, the property, part of Joseph Kaye’s grant of 1866, is sold by the Fineberg family to Hanna (John) Toulany, who owns the property to this day.

ACT III – In Which We Learn About Non-Conforming Use.

I need to talk to someone at HRM about how zoning is designated how it changes, so I called around and emailed some councilors and ended up talking to MacKenzie Stonehocker, a Planner for HRM Community Development.

Ms. Stonehocker was very helpful, but couldn’t get too detailed on the specific property because her whole office was in the middle of moving, so the files in question were in a two cubic foot box, ready for transport.

Despite that, the generalities of the area give us a good picture.  According to Ms. Stonehocker, the land use bylaws for Halifax were finalized in 1978, but were basically re-approval of 1950s zoning.  Probably the building was still zoned commercial, but without the detailed files it is hard to be sure.

In the late 80s or early 90s, the old City of Halifax had a city wide planning process, which said that the city should come up with specific zones and regulations, secondary plans, for the city’s neighbourhoods.

The Peninsula North Secondary Planning Area goes to Young Street, so one side of the triangle (Starbucks) is in it, the other side (Hydrostone) is not.  The planning area was cut into eight small sub areas.  3081 Gottingen is in Peninsula North Area Four, which is from Gottingen to Young to Barrington to North.

Current zoning and land use was approved in 1993, so that is likely when the property became zoned for residential.

Ms Stonehocker said that the process was pretty open, much like HRM by Design, so there would have been ads in the paper and notices sent to residents by Alderman.

What I gathered was that, like today, it would have been incumbent on John Toulany as owner of the property, to go to the meetings or write city staff and try and get or maintain a C2 zoning on the property.

I asked Ms Stonehocker about zoning, specifically how Toulany could operate there if it was residential.  She explained that his business was grandfathered, but that such “non-conforming use” agreements are very very specific, so the only business you are allowed, under the rules, to operate there is a grocery store.

To be a restaurant, the property needs to be zoned commercial, any of C2A C2 or C1 designations would do, or the property can get a very specific “non conforming use” agreement approved by HRM Council, something that is not uncommon.

Finally I asked Ms. Stonehocker if it is possible that someone simply made a mistake, that the property designation was transcribed incorrectly in 1950, or 1976, or 1993, or when HRM migrated from paper maps to computer based GIS systems.  She laughed and said that yes, sometimes mistakes happen, but it probably didn’t happen in this case.

ACT IV – Dénouement

The last Toulany business on this site, Toulany's Lunchbox, a, gasp, restaurant and corner store. (Google Street View)

So, the bottom line is that  it seems that sometime after young John Toulany bought the building in 1972, the City of Halifax rezoned the street, and it was decided that the Gottingen Street side of the triangle would no longer be a commercial one.

It is hard to know if Mr Toulany, who last month was in Lebanon and unavailable, knew about the change in status of his property.

It is hard to imaging a commercial property, that has always been a restaurant or grocery since it was built for those purposes, being rezone to residential.

It is easier to imagine the hard working, self employed Toulany missing the importance of the City of Halifax notices in the paper, and having it slip by without comment.

Maybe we have learned a lesson here.

Maybe zoning and neighbourhood plans need to have borders that end one lot BEFORE a street, rather than in the middle of a street.

It cannot make good sense for the commercial area around that park to exist in three totally separate planning areas.

There is a lot of rapid re-development of that neighbourhood and a lot of excitement around Caribbean Twist.  Hopefully, rather than seeing it as undermining the planning in zone 4, peninsula north, it will be easier for HRM Council to swallow the idea of ‘restoring’ the right to have a restaurant there, just like the good old Rex Café.

About 11:20 am this Friday twitter delivers this announcement from the @Chronicleherald – “BREAKING: HRSB super Carole Olsen’s husband leaked the Fells video to Frank, she admitted today. MORE LATER“

My immediate response was “SHE MUST RESIGN”. Moments later someone else on the web messaged me to say she offered to resign, and the HRSB Board did not accept her offered resignation.

Okay, I am far from a fan of Carole Olsen. Those of you who may have followed wayemason.com (the more egotistical predecessor to Halifax Politics dot ca) may recall I had a small but significant role in the south end and later peninsula wide school fight, getting the school board fired, and then gutting the ill conceived “Imagine Our Schools” process.

So yeah, let me declare a conflict of interest, because Carole Olsen was simply the leader of the bad guys for almost four years of bitter politics and fighting for what we thought was right. If you want to know more about that fight, check out Citadelschools.ca It is an understatement to say I am not a fan.

So I will admit that I am wondering about my own reaction. In my mind, of course she has to resign. Her husband leaked email that was highly confidential and possibly damaging to one of her employees. The admitted motivation of this leak was to support Olsen’s now revealed stance that Fell’s should be fired.

Am I wrong? Are past dealings clouding my judgement? I don’t think so.

Let’s leave aside Fell’s character, long service to the community, and long history of speaking truth to power when it needed to be done.

The Superintendent did not agree with her bosses decision.

She wanted to fire Fells, but the elected Board, her employer, voted not to fire him.

Her husband logged into the computer and emailed the confidential video to the media. His stated aim was to support his wife’s view that Fells should be fired.

We only have Olsen’s word that she did not know he was doing this. I for one don’t care one way or the other.

This action has opened herself and the Board up to lawsuits and litigation, and it has also now cast doubt over the willingness of this most senior staff person to support her elected Board, and as importantly, to support her staff.

How do HRSB principals feel today, knowing that personal employment information, private and between them and their employer is not secure, that their ultimate bosses spouse might decided to violate that employment confidence in an effort to destroy staff or managers who don’t tow the line.

How can she be allowed to stay in this position now? She is the Superintendent. The boss. The buck stops with her.

The Board should accept her resignation and move on.

It has been awhile since this has story has been news.  Eastern Passage did not get a recommendation in the late and unlamented “Imagine Our Schools” pseudo consultation in 2007 and 2008.

This theatrical simulation of public consultation was put on by the HRSB to get parents off their backs, and ultimately floundered when neither HRSB staff, nor the general public, nor one man school Board Howard Windsor were willing to accept the majority of the expensive, Toronto consultant created recommendations.

Sure, the Citadel Schools fight meant I spent three years fighting to not build new schools, and renovate what we have, but this is a totally different situation.  There are a number of reasons why an Eastern Passage school would be good for education.

The first is the volume of busing. Eastern Passage has been looking for a new high school for years.  The area is one of the fastest growing in HRM.

During the Imagine Our Schools I heard from HRSB that 450 students were bused to Cole Harbour from the Passage each day.  The parents in the Passage say that the number is now around 600.

No matter how you look at it, for the next 5-10 years the projections show 450-550 students at the area junior high, Eastern Passage Educational Centre, and that means for the next 8-12 years, there will be 450-550 students bused to Cole Harbour, and that is without additional growth in population and further development in Eastern Passage.  The parents group says this costs $350,000 a year.

This brings us to the second point, which is overcrowding and capacity.  Normally, I wouldn’t say busing alone is a reason to build a new school.  All over the Province, kids are on buses on the way to school every day, and all those residents of the Passage knew there was no high school there when they moved there.

The problem is that Cole Harbour is a seriously over crowded school.    Both Cole Harbour and the adjacent Auburn Drive are operating at 115% or more of capacity.  Cole Harbour is designed for 900 students and the HRBS website says there are 1048, Auburn was designed for 960 students and has 1109.

So let’s recap, we are busing 600 students to a high school that is overcrowded.   Both the schools are overcrowded and have a some history of discipline and race relation issues.  This brings us to the third point – we should address the needs of students when we recognize them.

We have the Black Report, we have the recent riot on the fields of Auburn, we have a history of problems at Cole Harbour.  We have the weird gerrymandering of the feeder schools (see the graphic below).

Cole Harbour, Auburn and Prince Andrew school districts.

Overcrowding these schools is not going to help anything.  Really, these schools should have an enrollment target of 85%, so about 800 students each.  This is a small but important part of making things right in this community.

A cost effective solution could be to turn the very new Eastern Passage Education Centre into a 7-12 school.  At most, a new high school should cost around the $15 million  spent on the recently build Sir John A MacDonald. Adding a wing and another gym to the existing EPEC site might keep the cost lower, and have the added bonus of creating a highly efficient school in terms of operations, custodial, and administration.

Once the new school is open, we could change the feeder schools to make sense, so both Auburn and Cole Harbour had populations in the target range of 800.

Sure in 10-12 years the population of these school is supposed to drop dramatically.  If this happens, at that time, we can change the boundaries again, put some of the students into Prince Andrew in Dartmouth, and close Cole Harbour and put 850 students in Auburn.

IF THAT HAPPENS.  God knows I don’t believe any of the projections we have been getting from HRSB.

So, to review, expanded EPEC, one principal, no buses, three schools that are no longer dangerously over crowded?  Someone needs to explain the downside to me.  I just don’t see one.

Maybe this has happened to you: you have been doing the best you can to help your community, but something happens, something just so frustrating and stupid that you think “Oh, why does it have to be this way?”

Kingston parking meter with inexpertly but cost effective sign taped to it.

I have been an organizer with the Halifax Pop Explosion music and arts festival for a while; our office has been on Gottingen Street for five years. For two years, we helped the local merchants association organize the North End Community Fair. The street festival took place on Gottingen Street the first Sunday of September. From Cunard to Cornwallis, traffic was re-routed for a day so the neighbourhood could enjoy a family-oriented street party.

One longtime community member describes it this way: “It is the one time of year where this street is about the people who live here and not about cars.” Closing the street gave the neighbourhood a sense of ownership and control.

But as we discovered, closing a street isn’t as easy as you might think. At least not in Halifax.

It can be as simple as walking and putting out a couple of orange sawhorses. That is how we did it in 2006, when the manager we needed to speak with at HRM was on vacation and a junior staffer decided that would be okay. In 2007, HRM charged a pittance to close the street for us.

In 2008, we applied to have the street closed on June 7, eight weeks out from the proposed event. Five weeks later, HRM got back to us, telling us the service would cost $916.95, taxes included.

We learned that about $200 of that was to put up “no parking” signs on Friday—that left almost $800 for the sawhorses. Four of them at each end of the street. Eight in all. One hundred dollars per sawhorse. We were stunned.

So I started asking questions and over the next three weeks, the email flew.

My first emails to the staff of HRM Traffic and Right of Way Services requested clarification. Could we hire private security to close the street? “No, only HRM can close a street.”

So, how do construction crews get streets closed? “Our section approves street closure permits and we only approve them if we are confident that it is done to our standards… construction crews must have the necessary certifications as per the Nova Scotia Temporary Workplace Manual.”

So I downloaded the manual. It said: “If the permit is approved, conditions met, and a company using certified Traffic Control Persons is hired, that would meet the requirements.”

Problem solved? Well, no. “No, HRM staff are the only people allowed, for risk-management reasons.”
In the meantime, I got an estimate from a private contractor, willing to provide large reflective barrels, sawhorses with flashing lights, signage and traffic-control officers for both affected intersections. The estimated cost was $360. That idea went nowhere.

By the end, we were arguing our case to chief administrative officer Dan English and his deputy Wayne Anesty. Our councillor and Mayor Peter Kelly were in on the emails. Management blamed union rules. Officials claimed that they had to have HRM supervision, at our expense, even if we hired a contractor. Risk management. Insurance. Standards. Professionalism. Certification.

We gave up a week before the event and accepted HRM’s rules. Two HRM staff came in a yellow truck and chucked out eight $100 sawhorses. They came back nine hours later. For those 20 minutes of work, we paid a bill of $800.
We didn’t do the fair in 2009, and probably won’t this year.

I realized that HRM’s staff was just following the rules but that doesn’t mean these are the right rules.

No one was willing to discuss changing the rules. No one would tell us how they developed them. No one could (or would) provide a written copy. It was just the way it was, and I was an ignorant civilian who did not know what I was talking about.

Last summer, I drove to Ontario to visit my family. As we strolled in downtown Kingston after lunch, I saw a sign taped to a parking metre on Princess Street, one of the city’s busiest downtown streets.

The photocopied sign said “BUSKERFEST – Please be advised – the road will be closed. Today 12–3pm. Princess Street from Wellington to Bangor. Please remove your vehicle. Thank you.”

There were no city workers in sight.