Halifax council approves Windsor Street exchange redesign with amendment

After much discussion and consideration, Halifax councillors have approved the Windsor Street exchange redevelopment project ‘s functional design — but with an amendment.

The vote took place during Tuesday’s Halifax Regional Council meeting, where councillors made it clear that the new design for the busy access point into Halifax’s downtown core did not meet all of their expectations.

“I feel like this is the best way to move it forward and provide a pretty clear direction. Council has been pretty unanimous, almost unanimous, on its concerns about this,” said District 7 Coun. Waye Mason.

“But it doesn’t risk losing the money and it keeps the project moving forward. Because I think it’s pretty essential that we see this project move forward in the next couple years.”

The new design was presented to council after more than a year of gathering recommendations and a study that was commissioned in early 2023.

The plan had already been presented to stakeholders, who spoke out against it.

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In a joint statement from More Than Buses, Walk ‘n Roll Halifax and the Halifax Cycling Coalition, the groups said “failure is guaranteed” if council adopts the new design, citing a lack of prioritization of  active transportation.

Many councillors agreed and said they could not support the design the way it was presented. Specifically, they felt the design didn’t achieve active transportation goals — such as prioritizing bus lanes, sidewalks and cycleways.

“For me, it’s a feeling that we didn’t meet all the goals that we set out to do related to transportation,” said District 8 Coun. Lindell Smith.

“I think we need to take a pause and make sure that we look at those aspects of what we agreed to do when we first started the project.”

In an effort to not slow down the project and risk the federal funding, councillors voted on an amendment to an approval, rather than a deferral for a staff report.

This now allows the next steps to begin, while municipal staff come back with the desired report for council and consideration of changes during phase 2.

A municipal staff member told council there was an “inherent schedule risk” in the project, because the federal funding timeline is fixed for substantial completion by the end of 2027. All this means it is critical to finish the design phase quickly, in order to be in construction next year.

“This work has been underway for a number of years. We are under pressure, of course, because of federal funding. We need to make sure that we can access that federal funding, but at the same time I’m not convinced that we have a good plan yet,” said District 13 Coun. Pam Lovelace.

— with files from Global News’ Mitchell Bailey and Rebecca Lau