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Scale
Humans aren’t good with big numbers. Or really small ones. We know that millions, billions and trillions are big numbers, but it is hard for our brains to process the difference between them. When US president Joe Biden presses lawmakers to pass a $5 trillion, $3 trillion or $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill, he loses most voters.
Another example. We used to worry about debt. We used to care how much deeper we were digging this hole every year, as measured by the budget deficit. Through much of the 1960s and ‘70s, Canada’s federal debt hovered around $100 billion (inflation-adjusted). We worried a lot about it. Today it is $1.2 trillion, and we don’t talk about it at all. I hasten to add that the federal government responded effectively to the pandemic, so this isn’t a critique of those decisions. Yet, I have a niggling worry that we seem to have blocked out this rather big future burden we have created for ourselves and our children.
Closer to home, about 25,000 folks live in Prince Edward County. About 13,000 households. 4,700 water customers. Despite all the new folks arriving each year, nearly as many leave. Over the past two censuses, the population of the County has declined. Fewer folks. Not more.
The ambition that some on County Council have for 25,000 folks, 13,000 households and 4,700 water customers is breathtaking.
Roads are the obvious starting point. The County has too many kilometres—a legacy of a provincial downloading project two decades ago. Yet Council has never acknowledged that it could not, and will never, afford this responsibility. A 2014 report prepared by KPMG, a consultancy, found that County roads and bridges needed $170 million in immediate investment. That was seven years ago. We didn’t have the money then. We don’t have it now. Worse, the roads crumble a bit more every year. Every budget season Council vows to get serious about its roads—throwing another million dollars into the tarry abyss. It is full-on denial. With your dollars.
It is how Council approves another study into County Road 49 every couple of years. The last estimate to replace this road, that I remember, was $20 million. It is equivalent to remodelling your kitchen in gold and granite but ignoring the massive hole in the roof.
The ambition isn’t limited to roads. $100 million for Wellington waterworks. $100 million McFarland redevelopment. A regional waterworks plan has been bandied about—big plans for 25,000 people, 13,000 households and 4,700 waterworks customers.
In recent weeks some representatives on Council have been advocating for a direct role in solving the affordable housing in this community. They have asked Shire Hall staff to come up with, among other things, a lending program for low-income prospective homebuyers as well as a scheme to subsidize STA owners if they convert their properties to long-term rentals.
It is hard to know if they were serious—or merely virtue signalling ahead of an election year. In any event, it was only a week later that Council was told explicitly it would not work. “The scale didn’t line up” to the size of the problem they hoped to fix.
Professor David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance Associate Professor, School of Urban Planning McGill University and a principal in UPGo, Urban Politics and Governance research group. He is an expert on these issues. His team was hired to examine the STA challenges in Prince Edward County.
Wachsmuth was diplomatic but emphatic on such notions. He said his team ran the numbers. “It was a short conversation. It felt hard to imagine that that kind of program could work at that kind of scale and feel like a reasonable use of public funds. The size of the incentive that would realistically produce some results would be hard to justify,” said Wachsmuth.
The professor was speaking to the subsidize-STAowners scheme, but could have equally been talking about the lending problem. We are too few households to fund such an enterprise. It doesn’t compute.
Later in the same meeting Council was asked to approve a substantial rate hike for water services. The discussion, such as it was, turned almost immediately on whether affluent water customers could subsidize the poorer ones. It revealed yet another misunderstanding of scale.
Let’s illustrate the problem in extremely rough terms. First, let’s set aside the fact that waterworks customers in Picton, Wellington and Consecon already subsidize the 517 waterworks customers in Peat’s Point, Fenwood Gardens and Ameliasburgh.
Then, consider that the waterworks customers in Wellington and Picton pay on average about $2,000 per year for this service. Say we cut this in half for a third of these 3,900 ratepayers (assuming the already subsidized households aren’t in this mix)—it would mean adding about $500 annually to the waterworks bill of the remaining 2,600 customers. It doesn’t work.
There was a time when Council understood it could, at best, be a catalyst for solving big challenges such as affordable housing, road reconstruction, waterworks renewal, etc. But when you lose sight of scale, ambition tends to grow exponentially.
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