A more realistic plan

Too many roads. Too few people. It was true 22 years ago when the province walked away from its duty to maintain municipal roads and bridges in rural communities. It remains true today. Worse, actually. For a few years after the split, our deadbeat province paid support to the municipalities it abandoned. But soon enough, those payments withered to a trickle. The federal government, the guilt-racked kindly uncle in this scenario, sends us a portion of the gas tax it collects each year. It helps pay some bills. We get by for another year. A few more years slip by. Eventually, we forget a time when we didn’t carry this burden. We forget that it was never ours to carry. That it had ever been another way.

It is newsworthy, then that Shire Hall is—at last—saying so out loud. Not in these words, mind you—they are more diplomatic and more pragmatic than this columnist. The practical assessment of our predicament, however, is essentially the same.

After two decades of pain, anger, bargaining and denial, the municipality has arrived at the acceptance stage of its break-up with the province and the staggering burden it has been left to manage. It is long past time we talked about what it means.

Since its formation, the province funded most municipal roads and bridges from general revenue—a portion of everyone’s taxes spread over every mile. It was a fair and reasonable arrangement and made economic sense.

But when the province walked away from this responsibility in 1999, municipalities were suddenly on the hook to maintain the decaying and crumbling web of roads in their jurisdiction on their own. It was and still is a fabulously unfair way to fund this sprawling network of gravel, concrete, and tar.

Municipalities have one primary source of revenue—property taxes. Permit me once more to lean on an overused analogy: a kilometre of street on the Danforth in Toronto may have several hundred property taxpayers contributing to its upkeep. A kilometre of Danforth Road in Hillier may have ten. Or fewer. While maintaining the Danforth is more expensive than its namesake in Hillier, it is not ten or twenty times more expensive. Thus the problem.

Relying on property taxpayers to fund roads and bridges may make sense in an urban setting; it is bananas in a rural community. In a report to council last week, the County’s road manager Adam Goheen explained that Prince Edward County has more roadways per person than any other single-tier municipality in the province. (Single tier in this context means we are wholly stuck with the responsibility of keeping them in good order. Gallingly, the province still dictates what constitutes good order.)

Goheen presented a stark picture. The County is responsible for 1,047 kilometres of roads, of which fewer than 40 per cent are in good condition. About 480 kilometres need immediate improvement, rehabilitation, or reconstruction. But the County is only spending enough to fix about 85 kilometres this year.

Some look at this situation and calculate that if we just plugged along, we would catch up in five or six years or so. We won’t. Here’s why. Our roads and bridges are decaying—more kilometres are being added to the list of the needy each year. Worse, those 395 kilometres of roads and bridges we don’t get to this year will get worse—and more expensive to fix next year.

A resolution is getting further away. Not closer.

So why not just fix the 480 kilometres and maintain the rest appropriately? We can’t. We don’t have this kind of money.

Goheen figures the County must spend about $200 million over the next ten years—half of that immediately—to restore roads to “an acceptable state of condition.” Currently, Shire Hall spends between $3 and $5 million annually fixing roads and bridges each year. (It has become fashionable during budget deliberations to toss another million into this hole at the deadline, as a show that council is getting ‘serious’ about its roads.) It is clear, however, that at this pace, the County can never catch up. Roads are crumbling faster than we can fix them. Unless something fundamentally changes, the County will never restore its roads to an “acceptable” condition. It can only manage the decay.

Goheen knows this. So, he has begun to prepare “a more realistic plan.”

It likely means more debt. And higher taxes. But it also means a long-overdue talk about how we will collectively make do with less. Maintenance standards will shrink. Some paved roads will revert to gravel.

To help guide the coming public and council debate, Goheen has prepared a list of factors to inform road-needs ranking. Broadly speaking, they fall into priority buckets with safety and risk management at the top of the list, followed by residential benefit, traffic volumes and economic factors.

It is a useful way to begin thinking about the problem.

There will be much gnashing of teeth and faux-secession fury aimed at the municipality when the details of “a more realistic plan” are revealed. More when the first asphalt roads revert to gravel.

And while Shire Hall must make prudent and reasonable decisions in this regard—especially in assessing the capacity of property taxpayers present and future to shoulder more of this burden—we must never forget that this mess is the product of a half-baked, amateurishly executed provincial municipal restructuring project dreamed up by Mike Harris’s government in the 1990s. Unremedied by subsequent Liberal governments since. Nor the current Conservative lot now.

A more permanent way to fund rural infrastructure must be found. Adding a point to the HST dedicated to this purpose has been floated before and didn’t get much traction. Sooner or later, we will need to revisit such an arrangement.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca

Comments (3)