Beyond repair

Closing all our libraries, museums, arenas, parks and town halls will not fix the financial problems this community and 114 others in eastern Ontario are facing. Erasing the history, the traditions and treasure trove of stories and records that tell us who we are and where we came from, will, in even the most optimistic scenario, only put off the day we run out of money needed to fuel our roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

So why are cherished places being placed on the sacrificial altar—to be offered up to a ravenous beast that will only be momentarily sated?

Last year the County spent a total of $3.8 million on its community services including libraries, arenas and museums. Meanwhile, $5.8 million was gobbled up just to maintain roads and clear them of snow. And this was just a fraction of the money required by the County to maintain infrastructure that was once the responsibility of the province.

In its report released this week the Eastern Ontario Warden’s Caucus, which includes the County’s Mayor Peter Mertens, warned that the burden carried by the mostly rural communities in the region is more than can be managed.

Knees are buckling under many jurisdictions as they struggle to maintain roads and other infrastructure dumped upon them by the province under Mike Harris—a policy continued under nine years of Dalton McGuinty’s government.

It was a bad idea from the get-go. Cities and metropolitan areas have many, many thousands of residents and businesses on streets such as Danforth Avenue in Toronto that help pay for its upkeep. Danforth Road in Hillier, on the other hand, has just a few dozen homes and farms. There is no way on earth these folks can produce enough tax revenue to fund the upkeep of their rural road. Yet this is the arrangement rural Ontario has been stuck with.

In an attempt to right the imbalance, the province has employed a variety of schemes to assist these communities as they tackle their roads and infrastructure needs. None has worked very well. As government money redistribution schemes tend to do—these “partnership” funding models have become convoluted, unpredictable, overly bureaucratic and subject to political whims and prejudices. The more compliant a jurisdiction is to its provincial masters— the more money that flows its way. These arrangements are mostly out of sight, however, and first to get turned off when money gets tight. Like now.

The Eastern Wardens Caucus reports that its rural municipalities are loading up on debt, emptying their reserves and piling massive tax increases upon their residents just to keep up. Others are looking despairingly at their community services and facilities as a means to feed the wolves at their door.

They predict that $500 to $600 million more will be needed each year in Eastern Ontario just to keep up with the maintenance and replacement of its roads and infrastructure.

It is a dead-end road. And they know it. The rural property taxpayer can’t bear the load alone.

Without a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between eastern Ontario and the province, these municipal leaders will continue to oversee the hollowing out of the facilities and services that define our communities. Soon municipal representatives will become merely administrators of roads, bridges and water plants.

These folks, including Mayor Mertens, have decided to speak up before it is too late.

This is the conversation we need to have. Community services must come off the table. We must continue to strive for improved efficiency and better use of our facilities—but this can’t happen in the context of fixing the County’s finances.

Eradicating community services in their entirety would net less than $4 million—a tough winter would burn through most of this short-sighted and empty savings. Eliminating all the County’s arenas, parks and town halls won’t fix the funding shortfall this and other rural communities are enduring because of bad provincial policies dictated a decade ago.

Worries about the future of libraries and museums are distractions from the message that must resound clearly from rural Ontario to Queen’s Park.

Either the province comes up with a more robust and predictable method to fund its roads and infrastructure, or they must take them back back. This arrangement is broken. Fix it.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca