Credit where credit is due: Tim Houston’s Tory government has followed through on an election promise and doubled funding to Nova Scotia’s municipalities, an increase of $32 million. The increase is for one year only but Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Lohr, who made the announcement last Friday, saysRead More

Affordable housing I came across a for-sale listing for Sadler Court, the 36-unit apartment complex on Alexandra Street in Sydney owned by New Dawn Enterprises. Sadler Court, as the New Dawn site says, “brings together the convenience of downtown living, the serenity of a natural setting, and, best of all,Read More

Having listened to Mayor Amanda McDougall’s interview with the CBC’s Wendy Bergfeldt, I’ve come to the same conclusion I reached last week: those meetings in Ben Eoin should have been open to the public. But at a bare minimum, they should have been ANNOUNCED to the public. Former Municipal AffairsRead More

In last week’s Inverness Oran, April MacDonald wrote about a significant issue that should concern everyone living in Nova Scotia — municipal by-laws, more specifically, municipal by-laws concerning agricultural land and land use. Many people are unaware of the by-laws that need to be created because things are changing inRead More

I wrote about Nova Scotia’s Capped Assessment Program (CAP) for municipal property taxes at some length back in 2017, drawing heavily on a report on the subject commissioned by the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities (NSFM) which would dearly love to throw the CAP high in the air, like MaryRead More

The first episode of the new season of CBRM Council was three hours long, featured a bunch of new characters and offered up at least one new twist in an old plot. It seems to have been filmed in a black light theater although, sadly, none of the councilors tookRead More

The CBRM will borrow from the province to fund a property-tax deferral program to assist residents and businesses “significantly impacted” by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first thing you must understand about this program — and you know this is vital because it appeared on the very first slide presented toRead More

I do not know what to make of Monday’s “pretend” budget-cutting workshop but I suspect it may be viewed in some quarters as a poor use of a cash-strapped municipality’s resources. To recap: as a prelude to the actual budget process this year, CBRM council held a session on MondayRead More

On the Waterfront (Not) The Sydney Waterfront District Association has changed its name back to the Sydney Downtown Development Association after experimenting with a rebranding for the past few years. (Cape Breton Post) I find this really funny because I’m the kind of person who finds rebranding failures funny. I’mRead More

While writing last week about the CBRM Regional Enterprise Network or CBRM REN it suddenly struck me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t really know what a Regional Enterprise Network was, so I decided I’d better educate myself. I began by looking up the existing CapeRead More