A gaping hole

A reckoning is coming. We have too many expensive things and too many ambitions. It is a freight train that has been chugging toward Prince Edward County since amalgamation 27 years ago. It is near now. We can feel the heat of the engine. Council can no longer choose to ignore it.

Lacking material reserve funds means that Shire Hall must pay this coming bill directly from your pocket—the taxpayer—through higher property taxes or in the form of debt payments, added to your groaning tax bill.

To prepare the groundwork for the big talk—a discussion we can’t ignore much longer—the County’s finance department is putting the finishing touches on a provincially mandated Asset Management Plan (AMP). It’s a dressed-up name for a simple thing: tallying up all the things the municipality owns and determining how it will continue to pay for its upkeep—or state-ofgood- repair (SOGR) in municipal jargon.

Spoiler alert: It can’t. Shire Hall can’t maintain 1,047 kilometres of road faster than they decay. It can’t keep up with the wear and tear of 63 bridges. It can’t keep 94 buildings in working order while the foundation crumbles and the roof leaks. It struggles to maintain 156 vehicles on the road. It is stretched to keep up with 23 parks and 158 individual assets (washrooms, playground equipment, benches and such) that comprise these assets.

The County’s population was sparse in 1998. It remains so. There may be a few hundred more residents today (we won’t know for sure until the next census is completed in 2026.) Nevertheless, taxes and user fees have skyrocketed since then. Yet its infrastructure funding gap widens. Its ever-expanding portfolio of assets decays faster than it can maintain them. Something has to give.

An Asset Management Plan is a place to start.

Currently, Shire Hall is seeking public input through its Have Your Say portal and an Asset Management Plan survey. The survey poses such penetrating questions as: if the municipality were a restaurant, what kind of establishment should it be?

Other questions are meant to probe your satisfaction with County services.

But by question four, the survey begins to ask residents to consider trade-offs: Which do you prefer, poorer conditions or higher taxes? What about big, costly repairs? Close a building or increase user fees? There is a breathlessness to the questions that suggests the authors feel they have never been asked before.

By questions 9 and 10, we get to the Sophie’s Choice part of the exercise: Which municipal services are you willing to diminish or eliminate to pay for those you can’t live without?

These are difficult sentiments to evaluate over a handful of questions.

Later in the survey, there is an attempt to segment responses by income level: Do wealthy individuals want better roads or lower taxes? How this data will inform the AMP is unclear.

A few questions that might have been considered: Given that property taxes have risen more than fivefold since 1998—when amalgamation was imposed to deliver greater efficiency in such services—is it reasonable or fair that the municipality remains in a deep infrastructure hole? That the hole is getting deeper?

Given that user fees—such as water rates, garbage fees, and planning fees—have risen much faster than the population, is it fair to ask where our money has gone? Why are long-standing infrastructure gaps widening?

In the event (likely) that the municipality cannot tax or borrow enough money to address these challenges, how much are you prepared to pay in a special infrastructure levy? $10,000? $20,000? $100,000?

Even if we (Shire Hall) could extract this kind of money, will you stop grumbling? Or will you grumble more?

The AMP is a necessary and worthy exercise. But Shire Hall suffers from debilitating myopia; it can only see the problem in front of it. A challenge to be fixed. A puzzle to be solved. There is little understanding of what has gone before. Little curiosity about how the place got to this point.

Shire Hall is populated by folks too young and too new to grasp that the County has been here many times before. Every year, fresh new commitments are made to fix the County’s infrastructure. Every year, the finish line moves further away. Successive terms of council promise to “get serious”. They push up property taxes while throwing bonus dollars into the hole as a token of its seriousness. The depth dial doesn’t register.

Meanwhile, the province continues to shrink from its funding role in municipalities like ours. Queen’s Park once funded the bulk of municipal infrastructure capital—waterworks, roads, bridges and such. No more. As Norfolk County found last week, the province now expects local taxpayers to fund these gargantuan projects.

As a result, Norfolk has gone back to the drawing board to come up with more modest plans. There is a lesson in that.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca