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End times
That should be the end of it. The $300 million plan to take water out of Lake Ontario in Wellington and deliver it to Picton was always a pipe dream. Unprecedented in scale, cost and risk, the plan was never going to work. That much is clear now. Worse, it risked a massive financial failure for Prince Edward County—from which residents would pay for many decades.
The waterworks scheme relied on forecasts of a mass horde of new arrivals to fill thousands of new homes. Last week, the County’s consultant poured cold water all over those predictions. Forty thousand new arrivals aren’t descending upon Prince Edward County after all.
An already sketchy plan is now in tatters. It should be the end of it.
But it won’t. Not immediately, anyway. It is likely to limp forward. The forces pushing for this scandalous expenditure are too big, too powerful and too relentless. They have strong incentives to strongarm Council into forging ahead—to spend money it doesn’t have, to risk the financial integrity of the municipality, and to act against the interests of residents. Their cheerleaders will insist upon it.
Watson and Associates have advised Shire Hall since the fall of 2007. The firm provides a range of services to the County, including modelling water rates, development charges and forecasting population growth. Understanding the latter is critical to informing rate and charge setting.
Essentially, it’s a pie-cutting exercise to determine who will pay and how much. To do this, Shire Hall provides Watson with the input—in this case, the amount of money Shire Hall figures it will need to maintain and replace infrastructure until a future date— typically 20 to 30 years. Then, Watson calculates estimates of population growth, determining how much of the cost is a benefit to existing residents and how much is needed to accommodate new homes and residents. Out of the grinder comes a recommendation of rates and charges.
The point must be made here that Watson never bought into Shire Hall’s growth expectations. While Shire Hall was designing waterworks in anticipation that Picton/Bloomfield/ Wellington was about to explode from 8,044 to 47,100 people, Watson forecasted a much more modest growth of about 9,700 folks across the entire County by 2051—a third of the growth anticipated by Shire Hall.
When pressed at a public meeting in Wellington in 2023 about its growth expectations— which many found unrealistic and contrary to the County’s history and population trendline—Watson’s Jamie Cook acknowledged that forecasting population trends is an inexact science. Cook assured the gathering that his firm would review its prediction periodically and make adjustments accordingly.
Last week, Watson did just that. It has downgraded its expectations for population growth in Prince Edward County by 30 per cent. Rather than 155 new homes built per year, Watson now predicts about 110 new homes will be built annually by 2051.
Simply put, this level of new homebuilding isn’t nearly enough to fund a monstrously oversized waterworks. At this rate of growth, it will be the year 2246 before the population arrives in Prince Edward County to pay for this scheme. Flying cars and colonies on Venus and Mars will be commonplace by the time we need this size of waterworks.
That should be the end of it.
Sadly, however, it seems little will change the minds of the unpersuadables—the folks who have enjoyed the Kool-Aid so far and are ready to walk off this earth for this pipeline. They’ve invested so much political capital and self-esteem that walking back their position in the face of hard facts and sober reassessment seems impossible.
The bottom line is this: Fewer new homes mean that much more of the $300 million price tag will be passed on to existing residents in the form of significantly higher water bills. That works out to more than $40,000 per household on municipal water.
When the weight of this debt becomes unsustainable— and it will—Council will be forced to spread the cost of this unnecessary spending over all residents, whether they receive municipal water or not.
Maybe that will be the end of it.
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