Who will pay?

Who do you think will pay? When thousands of new homes don’t emerge from the fields surrounding Wellington and Picton over the next 20 years? When the County’s population fails to double in size? Who will pay the $300 million needed to fund the waterworks expansion?

Shire Hall is building waterworks as fast as it can, confident that the masses are coming. But who will pay if they don’t? Who will pay when the County’s population stubbornly remains where it has been for 130 years?

Will it be the current crop of administrators, many of whom don’t live here? Likely not. They are not County water customers. They have nothing at stake but the prospect of building something big, shiny and new—and potentially financially ruinous.

How about the consultants? Will they pay? The engineering firms designing systems of pipes and pumps for a doubling of the County’s population? The financial modellers? Do you suppose they will pay when their calculations prove wildly off-base? The answer is an emphatic no. The consultants have already explained they will return in five years and update their numbers if/when predictions prove incorrect. (A measure, surely, of how cautiously they express their ability to see the future.)

Will it be the council members who approve this spending? Most councillors are not customers of the water system—they manage their water and wastewater from individual wells and septic systems. Just three of the fourteen members of Council pay a water bill. So, no, the folks approving this spending won’t pay the bill—not directly, anyway.

Casual followers of this saga may be forgiven for thinking that Wellington water customers will carry the cost of all this spending. For all the construction and building is happening in the village. Council is getting set to approve a massive regional water plant, a new water intake from Lake Ontario and a 20-km pipeline to deliver the water to Picton.

So maybe it’s just Wellington residents who will pay? Nope.

Waterworks costs are distributed equally across the County’s water customers— more or less. So the impact of $300 million of spending will be felt directly in Carrying Place, Consecon, Ameliasburgh, Peat’s Point, Rossmore, Fenwood Gardens, Bloomfield and Picton. And Wellington.

Folks may be forgiven, too, for thinking that the cost of all this work is already in their water bills. Because this is the story Shire Hall tells. It’s repeated in the propaganda that arrived recently with your water bill. But it isn’t true. It’s not even close.

Your current water payments cover as little as a third of the cost of this spending extravaganza. And the longer it takes for new homes to carpet the fields around Wellington and the Heights over Picton, the more ridiculous Shire Hall’s claim becomes.

So who will pay? Certainly, waterworks customers will. They are on the front lines of this struggle and are already paying much more than neighbouring communities. More than most communities in Canada. But it will get worse. Water bills could double. Triple, possibly. Perhaps more.

When this happens, other villages will undoubtedly seek to get out of the current equal billing arrangement. Will Carrying Place and Consecon go along with spending three times more for water they don’t get? Will Rossmore or Fenwood Garden residents? Suddenly, council members who sleep-walked through this debacle may be roused to attention.

But the exposure is far broader than that of water customers. The sheer weight of all this debt will impact all aspects of municipal government. It will rob future councils and future generations of the ability to fix roads, maintain bridges, or clean parks. All County programs and services will be vulnerable under the weight of all this borrowing.

It is why the councillor from Ameliasburgh sought assurances that the new debt Shire Hall was taking on last week would not impact “core responsibilities”. Councillor Maynard was referring to $80 million of new debt she and her colleagues had agreed to borrow to fund the long-term care home in Picton. Councillor Maynard has been sitting around the council table for a long time.

Maynard knows it is going to get harder. She knows that when Shire Hall has borrowed all it is allowed— and then some—the impact will be felt by every resident. Town halls will crumble without resources to maintain them. Parks and facilities will fall into disrepair for lack of upkeep. And roads will decline faster— some to the point of no return. Affordable housing—already on a precarious footing—will be remembered as something we once wished to do.

Debt on this scale has the power to smother everything a community wants to do—everything it wants to be.

Who will pay? We all will.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca

Note: Consider attending the special public meeting on Monday, August 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the Highline Hall in the Wellington Community Centre. Sponsored by the Wellington Community Association and the Wellington on the Lake Citizens for Responsible Growth, the meeting may be your last chance to learn about the risks of spending $300 million and what it could mean to you. Lend your voice to those urging Shire Hall to pause and take a fresh look at the risks.