Permanent fix

Should it be made permanent? That is the top agenda item that ought to be considered when the committee looking into the County’s waterworks system sits for the first time, likely next month.

We’ve been here before. In 2010, another ad hoc committee was formed to look at waterworks rates. The crushing reality of some bad decisions and poor planning were just being understood then. The debt-servicing payments and operating costs of a new sewage plant perched high above Picton were also coming due. Over the course of several months that year, a mix of council members, staff and residents met more than a dozen times to consider the many and various moving parts that make up this hodgepodge that is the County’s waterworks utility.

The committee did good work. Smart and able folks sat around the table. Mounds of documents and research were produced and examined. They peered into the nooks and crannies of the business—in a way that had never been done before. They asked questions that had never been asked before. Guided by an elaborate and exhaustive array of charts and tables, produced by consulting economist Andrew Grunda, the committee charted a stable and sustainable future for the utility and its users.

Yet it failed. And failed badly. Less than three years later, the costs were well more than the revenue collected. Few of the assumptions in the plan panned out. It assumed growth in new homes. That didn’t happen. It assumed the province would continue to fork over millions of dollars in grants to support the County’s waterworks. That, too, didn’t happen. Meanwhile, costs grew much faster than planned.

The County has, for the past two years now, been forced to break into reserves and borrow money to fund the waterworks deficit—something finance officials said they would never do.

Meanwhile, water bills keep climbing. Projects go untended, and hard decisions are postponed— kicked down the road.

So now we have a new committee. The difference is that this committee may have fewer folks sitting around the table with a direct stake in its outcome. Waterworks users may, in fact, be a minority on the committee, given the structure.

All the same, staff will be there. Andrew Grunda will produce yet more elaborate charts and tables. There will be a good discussion. And a better understanding of the system and its challenges will emerge.

The committee will make some recommendations and council, a large majority of whom are not customers of the County waterworks utility, will decide which of these to accept and which it will decline.

The committee will be dissolved, and its accumulated knowledge and expertise will escape into the atmosphere.

That will be a mistake and a terrible shame. This newspaper argued in 2010 that the committee should evolve into a permanent commission. We make the same argument in 2016, for the same reasons. There are simply too many moving and disparate parts in the County’s waterworks system for a temporary committee.

We take water from a well at Peats Point, from a busy bay in Picton, from profiteers in Belleville and a lake in Wellington and Ameliasburgh—one great, the other small. We process sewage in Picton and Wellington but nowhere else. Pipes have been well maintained in some places. Poorly in others.

And if we are being honest, we don’t know for sure where all our pipes are or where they go.

The waterworks utility serves fewer than a third of the County’s households. It needs to be governed—fulltime— by folks who have a direct stake in its operations and success.

The main weakness of the last waterworks plan was that it had no means to adjust or self-correct. When it failed, it failed badly. And kept failing. Continues to fail.

Some of the councillors looking to sit on this new committee have insisted that it look beyond rates to the business of the waterworks system itself. It is a worthy ambition. But not one that can be achieved in a matter of a dozen meetings.

A temporary committee can, at best, tell us what the system is at a moment in time. It has neither the means nor the time to examine the utility in a way that would make it truly stable and sustainable. It requires folks meeting regularly—looking at performance, measuring productivity and asking tough questions about what the utility can and cannot do. And bringing those issues to the users. Not only when there is another crisis— but on a regular and ongoing basis.

And when life begins to veer off plan, a permanent commission is better positioned to make small course corrections rather than lurch erratically with massive increases in water bills and market-disrupting connection fees.

The County waterworks utility is funded entirely by its users—those who pay a water bill. It is time these folks had a permanent seat around the table.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca