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Undoing
Rural Ontario wandered into a lot of bad deals in 1997 and 1998. In some cases, perhaps most, we had these arrangements thrust upon us.
There can hardly be a worse deal than the one that saw our communities trade control of funding of our schools for the care and maintenance of formerly provincial roads. In one swift move, we lost the means to direct the future of our schools, and we agreed to assume a burden we had no hope of being able to carry.
Today, we are mostly bystanders as the province closes schools around us, condemning our children to hours each day roaming the countryside on buses and driving some communities to a childless future. Economies unable or unwilling to accommodate children and families can’t grow—they wither and die.
Such school decisions are now made by mathematical calculations of projected enrollment and a facility condition index. There is no measure of the impact of a loss of a school on a community or the economy that depends on that facility to grow and attract families. But when you sit in Toronto or Mississauga, such concepts seem abstract, unquantifiable. They don’t fit into a model or spreadsheet.
Downloaded roads have had a similarly destructive effect on rural Ontario. Scrambling to manage the outrageous expense has pushed communities to gut traditional municipal services.
It is a useless effort. The combined weight of municipal and downloaded provincial roads and other infrastructure is smothering communities like Prince Edward County—places that continue to battle and scrap to the last breath.
The County estimates its roads and bridges need about $600 million to bring them up to a good standard. Add in the cost to repair and restore municipal buildings and other infrastructure, the bill approaches treacherously close to a billion dollars. The municipality spends about $10 million a year on capital renewal. This means that we will never catch up. Roads, bridges, pipes and town halls are decaying faster than we can afford to fix them. Each year the hole gets deeper.
Put another way, if the County fired every employee save for one whose sole job was to collect taxes, user fees and senior government funds and spend every dime of it on infrastructure renewal, it would take 20 years to catch up. No rinks, no parks, no town halls, no libraries, etc. for a generation. But we would have good roads.
The plain and simple truth is that we can’t borrow, tax or charge enough to put a dent into this burden. Yet we pretend otherwise. In the 2017 budget, under review this week, there is a proposal to spend $150,000 on consultants to assist the County in developing a sustainable long-term financial plan.
That such a task is impossible and pointless seems not to have unsettled anyone. Personally, I don’t have the means to fly to the moon—so measuring my inability to fly to Mars, or another solar system, seems redundant, at best. A bit unhinged at worst. Or maybe I’m just not ambitous enough.
The County’s manager, James Hepburn, doesn’t dispute these facts, but he contends that to remain eligible for provincial and federal funding he needs such plans in place—that these are the hoops senior governments set up, it is our job to jump through them. Regardless of how humiliating and pointless the exercise. Regardless that these are funds that might be better used in this community rather than spent on the consultancy industry.
I expect Hepburn is right, but even this, I fear, misses the point. One day, sooner rather than later, I hope, we will stop trying to catch up with a target that is moving away from us faster than we can run. Particularly when this means neglecting or overlooking the problems and challenges that deserve Shire Hall’s attention here at home.
But we must first be honest and straight about our situation. We are not alone. It is a yoke around the neck of most municipal governments in eastern Ontario. We did not do this to ourselves. We must stop punishing residents as though it is our fault. It isn’t.
We must vow that we will stop taking money away from the services and programs that residents rely on from their municipality. We must stop piling on taxes and racking up debt to fund the province’s downloaded roads or runaway compliance standards. We must vow to continue to invest in the things that will nurture our community and allow it to grow.
We must not allow municipal services to be diminished to pay for infrastructure that should never have been put on the backs of property tax payers.
Let us continue to spend what we can—about $10 million per year—on capital renewal. Index it to the cost of inflation. But no more—barring exceptional circumstances. Let us trust our works folks to use these dollars to triage as best they can. It won’t be enough, but then it never will be. Let us stop pretending we can do more than we are able.
Let us show leadership in rural Ontario. Not by walking away from this infrastructure need, but by admitting there is a limit to how much municipalities like ours can afford. Let us cap that contribution and encourage other communities to do the same. Let us do this before we have so gutted our municipal services that we no longer recognize the communities in which we live.
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