Roads

Roads. The County has 1,052 kilometres of them. Most (870 kilometres) are paved in one form or another. They cross hundreds of bridges and culverts. The estimated cost to replace the County road system including its bridges, is more than a half a billion dollars.

The good news is that they all don’t need to be replaced today. The bad is that the general condition of County roads is poor and getting poorer. They are likely to continue to decline Worse, there is very little we can do to stop it. At best we may slow down the rate of decay. That is it.

Late last year council decided on its last day of budget deliberations to extract another million dollars from taxpayers for County roads (See story page 3). Like impulsive children, they couldn’t resist the temptation of throwing candy into the basket at the checkout. It is, of course, an election year.

Last week, council learned just how far a million dollars goes in 2014. About six kilometres. That’s it. Oh, and about two dozen sideroads will get another coat of surface treating.

Clearly disappointed, councillors had wanted roads all over the County to benefit from their lastminute largesse. They wanted something tangible to show voters in their ward. Graders. Bulldozers. Surveyors. Flag persons and such.

And while roads officials were sensitive to this political necessity—spreading the surface treating fairly evenly around the County—they were dutybound to use the bulk of the money where it could be used most effectively. They decided upon a 5.8- kilometre stretch of County Road 8. Rather than spread their few resources too thin, the decision was to fix this bit of road. To do it well. To do it right.

It begs the question: what’s the broader plan? If we don’t have enough money to fix our roads—why do we pretend we do? Is it a matter of collective denial? Wishful thinking?

At a million dollars a year, it will take about two hundred years to bring every County road up to good condition. Not great, good.

The inescapable fact is that we are simply unable to keep up with the decline in our roads. Even throwing tens of millions at our roads each year would only serve to slow the pace of decline. So what exactly are we doing? And wey are we doing it?

Perhaps it’s all we can do—managing decline in an orderly way.

The County’s roads department uses an array of data to classify the condition of each road on scale from one to 10—with one being the worst and 10 being the best. The County has no 10-rated roads. It has plenty of ones. Most County roads are in rated a three or four. So the median is tilting heavily toward the worst end on this scale.

County roads officials would like to stop the decline—that is, stem the flow of roads falling into the lower categories (2, 3 or 4). In their dreams they would like, one day, to move the curve toward the better end of the scale.

But this takes money. Lots and lots of it. Where will it come from? Property ratepayers can’t bear this load alone—there are simply too few of them. The province should be helping— and has helped in the past. But its resources are nearly tapped out—spent foolishly, I would argue, in part on faulty energy schemes.

The upshot is that Ontario’s debt has nearly doubled in the past decade—projected to rise to $272 billion this year. Relative to the size of our economy—our debt is higher than it has ever been. The only reason Ontario’s debt isn’t rated as junk is because it’s backed by the federal treasury.

The bottom line is that any expectation the provincial government is suddenly going to wake up and discover it must help fix rural Ontario’s decaying roads, is likely not realistic.

So next month, County officials will present their first cut at a long-term asset management plan. With such a dreary title, this document may not arouse much interest outside the walls of Shire Hall. That would be a mistake.

For this will spell out the dilemma that we face now and the choices that lie ahead. None will be easy. None will be satisfying. There are only hard choices: either dig deeper into ratepayers’ pockets or watch roads decline further. Each has consequences that must be measured, assessed and analyzed in the context of everything the municipality does. What we choose to do about our roads will directly impact other aspects of County responsibility,including recreation, culture, heritage and parks.

This exercise will at last force us to ask some very hard questions: what if we can’t afford our roads? Are there simply too few of us and too many kilometres of roads?

This conversation is overdue. We need to understand what we can do and what we can’t. We need a clear explanation of the increased tax burden that would be necessary to make a lasting, tangible impact on the condition of County roads.

Otherwise we risk continuing to blindly toss money down a deep and dark hole.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca