Against the clock

Funding drama grips McFarland home redevelopment

We’re in a very difficult situation,” acknowledged Chief Administrative Officer Marcia Wallace. The County manager warned Council at several points during the capital spending discussion last week that tough decisions lie ahead.

Perhaps none more precarious than redeveloping H.J. McFarland Home. The current estimate to build a new 160-room long-term care home is $65 million. The 50-year-old facility is past its best-before date, and it can’t be renovated while folks are living there.

The province is willing to put up $42 million toward a new facility through an incentive program to build such facilities faster—but there is a catch. The accelerator money is only available if the County finalizes the design and produces a building permit by the end of August. CAO Wallace isn’t sure that can happen in time.

“We are not sure we are going to make that deadline,” said Wallace.

The consultants are driving the process, and the work required to produce designs and plans necessary to satisfy the funding program may not be doable by August. Nor is the province indicating it has any flexibility in extending the deadline.

There are real consequences for taxpayers. If the County makes the deadline and receives the incentive funding, the cost of carrying the debt for this project will be about $421,000 per year—equal to about a one per cent increase to the tax levy. If it misses the deadline and the County fails to land the provincial incentive funding, the debt-carrying cost rises to $2.4 million annually—about a five per cent increase to the tax levy.

“A lot is riding on us getting to a design state by August,” explained Wallace.

If it blows through the deadline, Council will have to decide how to proceed. None of the options are good. At a minimum, the County must install sprinklers at McFarland at the cost of more than $300,000. Further, the province has told the municipality the nursing home must be redeveloped by 2025 in any event. Oh, and single-tier municipalities such as Prince Edward County are compelled to provide a long-term care home for its residents.

“We are not looking to build something fancy or something no one has ever seen before,” said Wallace. She said the County is urging its consultants to leverage designs of recently constructed long-term care homes—borrowing the insight and knowledge of other such facilities built to current standards.

A deadline and $42 million tend to focus the mind.