HALIFAX—A ride on the bus or ferry will cost a quarter more later this year if council approves Halifax Transit’s final budget.

Councillors debated the 2019-2020 operating budget for the transit service during its latest budget committee meeting on Wednesday, voting in favour of a proposal to bring in an extra $812,000 in revenue by raising transit fares from $2.50 to $2.75.

“As other costs go up through inflation — wages, fuel and the like — there’s been no offsetting increase in fares to help deal with that,” Halifax Transit director Dave Reage told councillors on Wednesday.

According to the staff report to council on Wednesday, Halifax Transit’s fares are tied with Victoria, B.C. for the lowest among comparably populated cities across Canada, including cities like London and Hamilton, Ont., and Laval, Que.

Monthly adult passes are lowest among those cities, too, at $78. That’s $22.47 lower than the average.

And the city’s ratio of cost to revenue is the second lowest among those cities, collecting only 35 per cent of the cost of providing transit through fares.

The hike would be effective Oct. 1 and would be the first change since 2013, when fares rose from $2.25.

Reage said the current plan is to raise the cost of 10 bus tickets from $20 to $22 and the cost of a monthly adult pass from $78 to $85. Those numbers are subject to change, and he didn’t say what effect the increase would have on children’s and seniors’ fares, currently set at $1.75 — the second lowest among comparable cities.

“I’ve been here through various discussions around fare increases, and typically what I’ve always heard is, of course, that it’s the people with financial challenges that tend to be most hard hit by this, and I certainly appreciate that,” Reage told councillors.

“The good thing is, and what I think is a bit different this time, is we now have two programs in place to help a lot of those people: both our own internal low-income pass where the passes are half price, and also the partnership project with (the provincial) department of community services where people are receiving passes at no charge to them.”

Have your say

Councillor Tim Outhit argued against the increase, saying there are lots of residents who don’t qualify for those programs “but are still living paycheque to paycheque.”

He worried ridership numbers, which have been growing over the past year, would drop.

Councillor Lindell Smith shared that concern.

“Just hearing the word increase will sometimes deter folks from using our service,” Smith said.

Reage agreed there is a risk of slower growth in ridership based on the fare increase but said “elasticity” was taken into consideration and built into the budget assumptions.

Despite those concerns from other councillors, Councillor Richard Zurawski was the sole vote against the proposed budget.

“I don’t want to see an increase in fares,” Zurawski said. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get rid of fares because I believe the taxpayer is already paying for the transit system through taxes.”

The idea of completely free transit was a non-starter, but Councillor Waye Mason said he’d request a report through the transportation standing committee on eliminating fares for children and seniors.

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Councillor Lisa Blackburn was fine with a fare increase, given how long it’s been since the last one, but not fine with Halifax Transit’s chosen method for cutting its budget.

The plan was to hold off on implementing a major portion of the route changes in the transformative Moving Forward Together Plan, approved in 2015, at a savings of $679,000 in 2019-2020 and $2,037,000 in 2020-2021.

Included in those route changes is the new Route 8, replacing the popular 80, and a number of other routes from Sackville and Bedford to downtown, including four express routes serving Blackburn’s district.

“If you want to take thousands of cars off the bridges and off of Barrington St., these express buses are the way to do it,” she said.

Blackburn put forward a motion to have council consider putting the route changes back in the budget. That motion passed unanimously, so council will consider adding the $679,000 back into the budget at a meeting late in the budget process with a growing list of other items.

Halifax Transit presented the cutback version of its budget to align with council’s direction to all municipal departments to bring in three options for their budgets, corresponding to different increases to the average tax bill: 1.9, 2.1 and 2.9 per cent.

Halifax Transit’s full proposed operating budget, at $121.9 million, including the route changes outlined in the Moving Forward Together Plan, is a 5.4 per cent increase over its 2018-2019 budget.

That budget matches staff’s recommended tax increase of 2.9 per cent. Cutting the $679,000 brings the budget in line with a 1.9 per cent increase to the average tax bill.

Along with adding the route changes to the budget options list, council also added a number of extra items from the transportation and public works budget on Wednesday.

“Clearly, what we’re seeing today is we really don’t want to cut anything, or very little,” Councillor Outhit told his colleagues. “And that 1.9 is probably going to get blown up very quickly.”

Outhit suggested council would need to dip into reserve accounts and the projected 2018-2019 budget surplus to avoid raising taxes even more.

Councillors will consider doing that on Friday to pay for up to $21 million in projects that didn’t make this year’s proposed capital budget. Those include millions of dollars in bike lanes, sidewalks, bus lanes and finishing the Moving Forward Together Plan’s technology upgrades.

Budget debates continue over the next two months, and the final budget will be approved in early April as fiscal 2019-2020 begins.

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