Sidewalks, housing and urban decay among topics on first day of CBRM budget talks

Cape Breton Regional Municipality budget discussions got underway Thursday.

Steve Smith recently opened a coffee shop across from city hall in downtown Sydney, N.S.

However, that is not the building that he says customers usually inquire about when they come into his café.

“Quite often I am asked, ‘What’s the deal with that house across the street?’,” Smith said on Thursday.

Smith is referring to an abandoned home directly across from his business and city hall that has been boarded up for years.

He figures he will be asked about it even more when cruise ship customers start coming through his doors in early spring.

“It’s covered with pigeons,” Smith said. “It’s unsightly. It’s an eyesore and Sydney is a tourist destination.”

On Thursday, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality kicked off its budget process for the 2026-27 fiscal year with discussions surrounding its more than $83 million capital budget.

“The operating budget is just over $200 million,” added CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke.

Clarke said while it’s not what he would call a ‘good news’ budget because some items have been deferred or cancelled this year, there’s still a flip side.

“We’re staying within our ability to maintain tax rates, to freeze them as they are because we recognize assessments go up so there are no rate increases as part of the budget forecasting,” Clarke said.

A councillor for more rural areas of the municipality expressed frustration about the lack of sidewalks in parts of CBRM he says are growing.

“People can’t find a place to build a home in the city of Sydney, so what happens is they move out to the county, and they start looking at the areas in the roads that there’s not enough sidewalks,” said District 4 Councillor Steve Gillespite, who represents communities including Coxheath, Westmount and Sydney River.

Gillespie added that the hoops that must be jumped through at both the municipal and provincial levels, which could be costly in a different way.

“Unless we have enough services for them, we may start losing people if they move to another part of the province,” he said.

CBRM has said on multiple occasions that it simply doesn’t have the money to deal with the roughly 400 abandoned buildings throughout the municipality and it would need help from other levels of government to start tearing some of them down or proceeding with remediation.

“It shouldn’t cost me money to remove that building behind me,” Smith said. “It should cost the owner money to maintain it or sell it.”

Clarke added the new budget will include a newly hired municipal auditor, a move he said is aimed at better transparency and more public reporting.

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