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A hole too deep
County roads are in brutal shape. Venturing off main routes can be an adventure at the best of times (often enjoyable), but in March, it means risking severe damage to the more fragile Kinder Surprise-built cars that prowl County roads. Potholes have become wheel-swallowing caverns. Washboard roads test even the sturdiest bladders. Only the loud bang and sudden lurch sideways indicate the severity of worsening conditions.
But how could this be? The County has poured millions upon millions into its roads. It has built structural longterm escalating financing plans that extract ever-higher property taxes and pile on debt. But it’s never enough.
Still, some council members insist the municipality should tax more. Spend more. Year after year. Here is how it plays out: In the waning minutes of budget sessions over the past two decades, one or two council members find the right moment to stage their signature move, swooping in to propose yet another flamboyant, last-minute shovel of another million or two into road repairs (over and above the increase proposed by the roads department). Yeah, that’ll do it!
But it never does. It can’t. The arithmetic doesn’t work.
Councillors who promote the endless (read pointless), wasteful and desperate spending spree promise their reluctant colleagues that “their residents will thank them.”
However, a few months go by, millions more have been spent, and their roads are worse than ever. Routes repaired just a year or two ago are crumbling and pitted again. Residents are in a mood—but it isn’t gratitude.
Here’s the thing: Council has a truth problem regarding its roads. It knows it can’t afford 1,046 kilometres of roads. It has just 25,000 people. Just 13,000 property taxpayers to fund a billion dollars of road infrastructure, decaying faster than the municipality can patch it up. The problem is too big. Our numbers are too few.
Council knows the truth, but can’t say so out loud. They are afraid to be straight with residents.
The challenge is magnified around Wellington this winter—and will worsen as spring releases its frozen grip, which is currently holding fragile roads together. Due to a massive waterworks project underway in the village, highway traffic is diverted onto roads more regularly traversed by tractors and bicycles. The detour routes were never made to manage this kind of traffic—heavy trucks and hundreds of cars daily.
Predictably—and predicted—these roads are falling apart. Navigating them is dangerous. Great caution and attention are needed. The fallout will be expensive. Vehicle damage is just the start. Detour roads will have to be maintained to the condition of a highway for months. Afterward, they will certainly require major reconstruction.
We’ve been over this before. Many times. I’m sorry for that. But unless something changes, Shire Hall’s sleepwalking trajectory toward worsening roads and a serious failure is sadly foreseeable. So what to do?
Council must begin by telling the truth. It must level with residents. Explain the arithmetic. Shire Hall must have an honest conversation with residents about the scale of the problem, the rate of decay and the unbearable cost of it all. Be straight with the folks you serve. Have some faith in your fellow residents to understand our common problem.
In the meantime, here are a couple of recommendations: Triage the worst. Stop the bleeding.
Pull resources from long-term programmatic spending—it isn’t working—and equip a team to fix the most critical routes as problems arise. Shire Hall can’t fix everything, and should stop trying. Instead, it should concentrate on saving the most important bits. Fixing the dangerous. Salvaging the salvageable.
Revert sideroads back to gravel. In an earlier bit of gross mismanagement, many County roads were paved under the misguided belief they would be less costly to maintain. It proved a disaster. And the scheme was abandoned. But now these residents have the worst of both: a crumbling roadway and the inability of a grader to come by to smooth it out. Council has talked about sending roads back to gravel for over a decade. Just do it already.
Were it my business, I would put my roads team in a room with a clean sheet of paper and keep them there until they produced a detailed outline of a roads plan. No outside consultants. No council members seeking to swing resources to their road. Just the guys who deal with it every day. Folks who know the issues, challenges and financial constraints of County roads. I would propose an annual budget of $10 million, and I would listen to them explain how they would spend it. I would emphasize that there was no more money. Then, I would ask them to implement their plan, knowing it could hardly be worse than the current roads plan.
Governments, at all levels, have gotten away from the things they used to be good at. The road back begins by being straight with people.
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