Halifax Mayor Andy Fillmore delivered his first State of the Municipality address before a crowd of more than 800 people at the Halifax Convention Centre ballroom on Monday.
“These times are not business as usual,” said Fillmore, referring to economic tensions between Canada and the United States around tariff.
Fillmore was elected as mayor last October after spending nearly a decade as Halifax MP with the Trudeau government.
Fillmore said when he heard former mayor Mike Savage was not going to seek his seat again, he felt the call to step up to create a better city.
An urban planner, Fillmore shared his vision for the municipality by looking at three keys focus areas: affordability, housing and mobility.
Fillmore stressed the municipality won’t be able to work on these sectors alone, highlighting the need for constructive relationships with the provincial and federal governments.
The mayor noted the cost of living is top of mind for many people and he feels the municipality can’t keep asking residents and businesses to pay more.
The mayor and council passed their first budget last week, which included a promise by Fillmore to flatten spending next year and find new revenues outside of taxes.
“We have to keep the tax rate steady and level and fair, but as I mentioned in the State of the Municipality address today, in Halifax, about 82 per cent of our annual budget comes directly from the tax rate. Stacked up against other Canadian cities, for example, Calgary is down around 45, Edmonton is at 59, so we have a lot of work to do to diversify our revenue sources so we are less reliant on the tax rate,” Fillmore told CTV News Atlantic’s Todd Battis.
The mayor says there are more than 4,000 people working at the municipality and his next area of focus is making sure the staff is directing their energy and resources toward the delivery of the core services residents expect.
“I talked about engaging an external third party value for money audit for the municipality, which I intend to proceed with this year, that will help us to locate some of those efficiencies and also to make sure that the programs we are engaged in and funding are effective,” said Fillmore.
“I’m not interested in layoffs or anything like that, I am interested in knowing if we can redeploy human and financial resources in a more effective way to deliver the services people need.”
The mayor and council passed their first budget last week, which included a promise by Fillmore to flatten spending next year and find new revenues outside of taxes.
Fillmore said he wants to launch a mayor’s taskforce on how the city can better understand and use artificial intelligence to improve the work of the municipality.
“During the election campaign when I became mayor, I was looking at cities across the country to see what they were doing with the opportunities, that are literally growing by the day, to use AI, machine learning,” said Fillmore.
“We found that cities that were using AI to identify and prioritize pothole filling, we saw cities that were using AI and machinery to improve transit service, but, as I said today, the things we don’t know we don’t know and that’s what the task force is really all about. I believe we have enormous data and how we use that data with AI is going to be the answer I’m looking for.”
He said he’ll look to create strategic partnerships with the building sector, not for profit and other levels of government to battle the housing crisis.
“We have not been able to speed up the delivery of homes at the rate that we need to. To close our 30,000 home gap that we have in the municipality right now, we need to be building around 8,000 homes per year,” he said.
“Last year, 2024, we just cracked 3,000 so we clearly have some work to do.”
As for mobility, Fillmore said Haligonians deserve a reliable way to get to where they need to be and on time.
“If we can provide a credible, on time transit service that people enjoy riding on, that’s easy to use and on time, people will move from their cars back into buses and that will ease congestion,” he said.
“That, in combination with some major infrastructure projects… like the Windsor Street Exchange, which will remove that traffic light.”
Fillmore added the transit challenges are not insurmountable.
“But we will be required to shake things up,” he said.
“Halifax has so much going for it.”
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