Water/Wastewater Commission Greg Campbell (no relation, a point I feel obliged to underline regularly for his sake), manager of technical services for the CBRM’s Water Utility, appeared before CBRM council last night and I realized that I had dropped the ball in my coverage of his issue, which is theRead More

On 28 March 2023, the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board (UARB) approved a request from the CBRM (on behalf of its Water Utility) for a rate hike, the municipality’s first since 2019. The increase, for residential customers, will look like this:   The Board also approved a plan toRead More

Richard Starr had already got me thinking about how centralized power is in Nova Scotia before Auditor General Kim Adair drove the point home for me on Tuesday. Starr has been tracking this province’s anti-democratic tendencies for some time now via his Starr’s Point blog, and back in early November,Read More

CBRM Council held a relatively brief meeting on Tuesday morning that included a presentation from the municipal Water Utility on a proposed water rate hike. CBRM’s Water Utility, according to this handy description provided by the Utility and Review Board (UARB) back in 2017, is: …comprised of seven distinct areas,Read More

CBRM council voted last night to hire a consultant to conduct a Utility and Review Board (UARB)-mandated district boundary review and make recommendations about district and council size. Planning and Development Director Michael Ruus had been asked, during a special council meeting on January 25, to prepare an Issue PaperRead More

Full disclosure: I have not read Nova Scotia Power’s (NSP) application to the Utility and Review Board (UARB) for a 10% rate increase over the next three years — an application that apparently runs to 1,500 pages. I’ve read a lot about the application, though, beginning with NSP’s initial pressRead More

A spectator drew my attention to the published decision in Cape Breton (Regional Municipality) v. Nova Scotia (Attorney General), 2019 NSCA 77. That was the CBRM’s attempt to get the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal to overturn the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board’s (NSUARB) decision in the case ofRead More

The CBRM has asked the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal to overturn the UARB’s decision in the case of a proposed Big Pond RV park. The papers were filed on February 21 but CBRM regional solicitor Demetri Kachafanas told the CBC it could be “months” before the case goes toRead More

I make New Year’s resolutions and this year, among other things, I’ve resolved to try and treat arguments solely on their merit — I will not worry about the identity or background or past statements or biases or level of information possessed by the person or persons making the argument,Read More

Editor’s Note: Mayor Cecil Clarke’s contention that discussing council remuneration in camera (and treating elected officials as “personnel”) is a longstanding CBRM practice sent me scuttling to the “CBRM Mayor and Council” clippings file at the McConnell library, to research some of the remuneration (and related) issues council has dealt withRead More