County News
Let’s talk waterworks
The County is hosting an online information session on Tuesday, April 20, to discuss the impact of development on the municipality’s waterworks infrastructure. The online meeting will look at development pressures more broadly in Prince Edward County, but will have a particular focus on Wellington.
Plans for thousands of new homes are currently wending their way through the County’s planning approvals process. When, how many and if they get developed remain open questions. In any event, new homes mean expanding the capacity of the County’s varied network of pipes, pumps and plants that make up its waterworks infrastructure, a good deal of which must be in the ground before the first house is built.
Plans for thousands of new homes are currently wending their way through the County’s planning approvals process. When, how many and if they get developed remain open questions. In any event, new homes mean expanding the capacity of the County’s varied network of pipes, pumps and plants that make up its waterworks infrastructure, a good deal of which must be in the ground before the first house is built.
Picton came to the amalgamation marriage with an old water plant and a demonstrably vulnerable intake line. Its wastewater plant was worse. The replacement plant, overlooking Picton, proved wildly expensive and well beyond estimates produced at four stages of the project. The remaining four water systems are small and disjointed, hobbled by their own expansion challenges.
Expanding the County’s waterworks requires big investment. According to Provincial rules, new development must foot this bill in the form of development charges. This charge is recovered in the sale price of each new home. The risk to existing waterworks customers, however, is that the utility—in this case the municipality—must make a massive in- vestment without the certainty that these costs will be recovered. If the market for new homes dries up or lenders find a safer return elsewhere, the municipality—read the users of the system—could end up with miles of waterworks capacity and few users to pay for it. It is a significant gamble. At a minimum, existing water system users must pay the financing and carrying cost of the infrastructure expansion until enough homes are built, and development charges are collected.
To help offset this hazard, the County has spent the past couple of months negotiating with developers to share the infrastructure development risk—insisting they put up millions of dollars upfront. We may learn some details from these discus- sions on Tuesday.
In any event, waterworks rates for all users are likely to continue their steep upward climb.
The information session will take place online. The meeting will stream online on the County’s YouTube channel from 6 to 8 p.m. You may submit questions prior to the meeting by sending them to Catherine Sinclair at csinclair@pecounty.on.ca
The meeting will be recorded and available for playback afterwards.
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