CBRM council seems to have righted a three-year-old wrong during its July 6 meeting by declining to extend a waterfront pre-development agreement with Martin Chernin’s Harbour Royale Development Ltd (HRDL) — an agreement that included a new central library. As Mayor Amanda McDougall explained to council, this does not precludeRead...

Here are the important takeaways from this morning’s CBRM special council meeting on the proposed new CBRM Central Library:   Aurevoir, HRDL? Council took a major step toward ending the agreement that has given a private developer, Martin Chernin’s Harbour Royale Development Limited, control over the proposed new library. AtRead More

Reports this week that the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation is considering moving the Halifax casino from its waterfront location must surely have raised a red flag for anyone who remembers that relocating the Sydney casino is a key element of developer Martin Chernin’s plan for the Sydney waterfront. It’s notRead More

Have you read latest CBRM Central Library study? Anyone outside CBRM reading about the private developer who has been given control over the project would probably write it off as fiction, but we know better, don’t we? The study in question is the service, programs and operational plan commissioned fromRead More

If you were a cash-strapped community of communities looking to cut your greenhouse gas emissions and had $100,000 to spend, how would you spend it? Would you blow the boodle on a preliminary study for a “district heating and cooling system” in Sydney’s downtown core? A system that would serviceRead More

Something amazing almost happened during Tuesday afternoon’s (ir)regular monthly meeting of the CBRM council. As I predicted (call me Kreskin), Martin Chernin and Jim Wooder of Harbour Royale Development Limited (HRDL) asked for an 18-month extension to their exclusive agreement to develop the Sydney waterfront — a development that includesRead More

Can you believe 2019 is almost over? I can’t — and do you know who else probably can’t? Martin Chernin of Harbour Royale Development Limited (HRDL) and Albert Barbusci of Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP). Why is that, you ask? Well, because each of them faces a big deadline forRead More

Grandstanding Okay, so on Tuesday, as I was burrowing through the documents I’d received from the feds relating to the 2012 sale of the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club, I thought I might try to follow the CBRM Council meeting about the library at the same time. (You know howRead More

I just watched last week’s CBRM general committee debate over funding for the new central library and heard Mayor Cecil Clarke declare the project “dead” because the federal government has not come through with its share of the funding (either for a programming and internal operations study or for theRead More

I have been trying to determine how, exactly, we decided to locate the new CBRM central library on the Sydney waterfront and as best I can figure, it happened like this:   Architectural & Facility Planning In June 2011, the Cape Breton Regional Library (CBRL) Board initiated a study toRead More