Housing and affordability top issue
Mason hearing about across HRM
WAVERLEY: Three main topics are the clear concerns of the majority of people in the Halifax Regional Municipality being heard by Mayoral candidate Waye Mason.
Mason has visited the Fall River/Waverley area a few times, stopping in at community events and on Aug 2 sitting down for an interview with The Laker News over fish and chips at the Waverley Legion.
He was asked what the three top issues are that he’s hearing about. To no surprise, the top issue is housing and affordability.
“I think you see people who are excited that the city has changed and has more energy and is growing, but are worried that it’s not working for them,” said Mason.
“You definitely hear that from the farthest points in rural HRM to the heart of downtown Halifax. People want to talk about housing and affordability.”
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He was asked about the importance of getting out to areas like Waverley; Fall River; and Musquodoboit Valley, why he has made it key to the early days of his campaign.
Mason spoke of when he was first elected 12 years ago and was on the Halifax Public Library board. He had only been to four of them, but there’s 14. He went to them all.
He said housing and affordability is an issue everywhere across HRM.
“Everybody’s talking about that,” he said. “It’s different in rural than it is in in town. Like you’re seeing the farther out you get, the more it’s somebody who wants to work at the hospital or someone wants to work at the high school and is in their mid-twenties. They used to be married and they were going to buy a house and start having kids right away in Upper Musquodoboit, etc.
“Now they want to rent a place and try it out. There’s a different kind of housing.”
Mason said the housing issues are complex and different in every community.
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But for the Fall River area, the issues vary vastly from within city limits.
“On top of that, specific issues out here, traffic and transit are a big piece,” he said. “As municipalities grow, traffic gets worse. That’s true. We’re going to see traffic continue to increase.
“But the question is how do you manage that traffic? There’s plenty of places where we’re driving around where we’re thinking, wow, this intersection isn’t designed properly, it should be a roundabout, the signals don’t work like they should, that kind of thing.”
Mason spoke about working with Deputy Mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon to make the motion to have when the Aerotech Connector is done to have the bus stop in the core of Fall River, instead of stopping up at the park and ride.
“Transit and traffic are a big deal on a very local level,” he said.
He said two other topics are issues he’s heard a lot about—the Carr Farm and its proposed treated effluent going into Lake Thomas and the Ingram Drive development.
“The Carr Farm and the province’s special planning area that enabled the development at Ingram Drive where the second exit had not been allowed by CN over the tracks, there’s a real concern here, as there is in a number of other areas,” he said.
Mason will be volunteering to make pancakes at the Pancake Breakfast on Aug. 18 during the Keloose Festival at the LWF Hall. He said he will be sticking around there if any residents had questions they would like to ask him.
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Mason also thinks the tax structure needs to be reviewed.
“I think there needs to be a real good hard look at what the general rate is, and it needs to be adjusted to reflect if you don’t have the same level of services coming to you,” he said. “I’m going to commit to addressing that, changing that and making those changes.”
He believes the growth HRM has seen, and the energy is something most people support.
“Most people are excited that we’re no longer seeing all the businesses moving to Moncton and all the kids going to Fort McMurray,” said Mason. “That has changed, and we have a new swagger and energy. But to make that work for everyone, we now need to harness that energy and that economic opportunity, and we need to use that to make sure that nobody’s left behind.
“That means we need to make decisions more quickly than we have in the past. These issues are present and scary for people who are facing homelessness or the senior making the decision about, do I eat or do I take my medicine, etc.
“We can’t solve it all at the municipal level. The province and the feds are going to have to be really involved, but what we can do, we should do as quickly as possible.
The idea is you sit down with everybody, you come up with that plan and in the very first council meeting, you deliver a strategic plan with timelines and deadlines, and you get to work right away.”
In this scenario there would be no asking for staff reports or no working toward consensus, Mason said.
“One of the things that Tim Houston says that I agree with is we need to do things faster,” he said. “So the city needs to go faster.”
