Roads hole

Shire Hall presents options for deteriorating County roads

County staff presented Council with an array of financial scenarios to keep up with the repair of the County’s roads network. Condition assessments of all municipal roadways were completed in 2021 by StreetScan, a company that inspects roads using mobile sensing technology and provides detailed visual records.

It’s a big hole. The County can either continue on the status quo or, as staff recommends, ramp up road spending to $25.4 million each year—more than three times the current spending on maintaining County roads.

In either case, the County roads will continue to deteriorate and, as a result, will require future operational budget implications for pothole patching and maintenance. They contend that in time and with the significant spending increases prescribed in this plan, however, this deterioration will stabilize.

Director of Operations, Adam Goheen, led Council through the multi-year capital plan.

“As Council is aware, we have a substantial infrastructure deficit with respect to roads,” explained Goheen. “It will take many years for the County to achieve a sustainable level of funding required to improve the network to an acceptable level of service. If we continue down the same path, the condition of our roads will continue to decline forever.”

Councillor John Hirsch said the municipality had come a long way in four years.

We have actually implemented science, and we have proper technical evaluation of road conditions,” said Hirsch. “We’ve been moaning for years that we are never going to be able to get our roads in shape. This, to me, is a roadmap that we actually can get there if we are prepared to spend the money,” he added.

But for Councillor Brad Nieman, there were still too many questions.

“Where is the roads list that will be done?” he asked. “We have asked that for eight years, and the answer we got back was, ‘we don’t have the information.’ Now we have all the information, and we still haven’t seen a road list to say these are the roads we are doing for the next five or six years.”

Goheen explained that the data was waiting for a dollar amount to be input. Then the software will provide that information.

“This report is structured as a pre-budget conversation,” said Goheen. “What we need from Council is a signal of the funding level. We need to type in the dollar values that we can use to structure this program, and the model will optimize the techniques provided based on the dollar amount we have to spend, and we will have that five-year plan for you for budget.”

Councillor Chris Braney appreciated the five-year capital plan, but wanted to know if the County could leverage upper levels of government to pay a greater share.

“I think we need to be more aggressive with shaming the Province to an extent,” said Braney.

CAO Marcia Wallace explained that the County isn’t in a unique situation compared to other municipalities in the province.

“In the three years I have been here, we have done several meetings and requests for senior levels of government to provide funding. I have had senior-level staff meetings. But that is one of the constraints we have. There just aren’t grants,” she said.

Councillor Janice Maynard has been advocating for an increase in the roads budget for a long time.

“I’ve been waiting for this since the day I first sat in a councillor’s chair,” said Maynard.

She said roads are the municipality’s key asset and should be its number one priority.

“We know that we have long under funded for decades our roads in this County and now we are paying the price,” said Maynard. “Personally, I’m in favour of taking the bandaid off and doing what should have been done over the last number of many years.”

“I think everybody recognizes that this is a reality check,” said Councillor Phil St-Jean. “We are in a bad spot. I think we have always known that. But I think we are on a path forward that is the right thing to do. People will not be happy when they see their tax bills increase. But we have chronically underfunded our roads for decades. It is coming back now to haunt us.”

Councillor Corey Engelsdorfer asked if taxpayers would actually see tangible results. “I worry that if we dump all this money in, and we don’t see results, then it is just another $25 million a year that gets lost somewhere,” he said. To that point, Councillor Phil Prinzen worried that the money could be eaten up by larger bids.

“Are we going to see contracts coming in higher knowing that the County is putting a bunch of money down and really we aren’t going to see the results?” asked Prinzen. “I worry we are spending more money and not getting bang for our buck.”

Both Goheen and Wallace assured the group that by investing three and a half times more money, the results would be visible.

“I would say yes, indeed,” said Goheen. “This is a very aggressive ramp-up of funding. Definitely, you will all see significant improvements. Tangible and measurable improvements in roads.”

“You are going to have many roads better than they were, but you will also have many roads much worse,” added Wallace.

The report was accepted and will be part of the 2023 budget deliberations in February.