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Breathe
It should be a time to celebrate. The looming weight of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending has abated. The threat of forever-soaring water bills has, for now, diminished. The immediate danger has passed. It should be a moment to breathe a sigh of relief.
And in big, important ways it is. The fantasy that Wellington would soon erupt into a town of 14,000 people has, at last, been revealed as the delusion it always was. Same for the technicolour hallucination that a million square feet of commercial development was, but for lack of waterworks capacity, ready to bust loose in Wellington. Same, too, for the notion that Picton would suddenly explode into a small city of 32,000. It was never plausible. Never reasonable.
Yet, somehow, the idea took root at Shire Hall, reaching deep into their collective sense of purpose. Their catechism revealed a frail grasp of this place’s history and traditions, and proposed a radical reshaping of this community.
Wish-casting an endless line of moving vans pulling into Picton and Wellington, then-leadership’s fevered ambitions became the foundation for planning, designing and building a massive, and ultimately ruinous, waterworks expansion in this community.
It nearly steered the County off a cliff.
You were told repeatedly that “growth would pay for growth”. It became an article of faith. “In Developers We Trust”.
It was never going to happen. It couldn’t happen. And it didn’t happen. None of it. Like all bad trips, coming down was always going to be the hardest part.
The pace of new homebuilding has declined every year since 2022. Last year saw the most anaemic year of building— of all types—in a decade in Prince Edward County.
It must be noted that Shire Hall’s consultants never really bought into the hockey stick theory of population growth. So when Watson and Associates would no longer toe the line, then-Shire Hall staff were forced to invent growth data to support the big lie. A list of ‘imminent housing projects” was cobbled together and promoted as evidence that the County had to prepare for the tsunami of homebuilding they said would soon be sprouting on the edges of Wellington and Picton.
With Council’s decision last week, Shire Hall may at last begin to unravel the bigspending plans unleashed by overstated growth projections. It’s important to recall how close we came to disaster. Had the then-municipal officials succeeded in setting its full construction plans in motion, it would have meant at least $55,000 in new debt to be borne by every household with water service in Prince Edward County. We would have carried this burden for decades. Doing so would have added $3,100 to the average water bill every year. This prospect alone should have ended this crazy plan.
We dodged a bullet.
Well, not entirely. Not yet anyway. There remains a deep, open wound running across the top of Wellington—an emblem of big municipal infrastructure contracting gone awry.
Despite Shire Hall’s retreat last week, there was, sadly, no update on the water and wastewater trunklines project in Wellington. The project was due to be completed by last June. It may be a year before the Millennium Trail is restored and usable again in Wellington.
Water ratepayers have received no information about how much has been spent so far on this project, or how much more it will cost to complete. The addition of a sewage pumping station has already blown out the trunklines’ original cost.
It seems likely the trunklines project will be overbudget— potentially wildly overbudget. Waterworks customers deserve to know the truth. The funders of this utility have been kept in the dark throughout the sad course of this project.
Worryingly, there are still some who will continue to suggest that Shire Hall’s change in direction is short-sighted, that Council ought to be bold. To consider a 30-year horizon.
But as the Wellington councillor, Corey Engelsdorfer, put it last week, “It’s easy to be optimistic when the municipality is front-end funding the costs.”
In his comment, there is the clearest illustration of the challenge before Shire Hall. Of course, the municipality must have a multi-decade lens—especially when planning infrastructure. But it can’t just make numbers up. It can’t prepare for a future informed only by the development community.
Shire Hall can’t rely on “an active developer community,” or “developers keep knocking on our doors” as evidence of anything at all. It is particularly the case when a land appreciation play is just as likely to drive land acquisition around Picton and Wellington as any ambition to ever build a home.
It isn’t evidence of anything other than there is money to be made by transitioning farm fields into subdivision plans (with municipal services nearby). For some, it is their entire business model.
So yes, it is a moment to take a breath and let your heartrate subside. One day, we might even be able to laugh about it all.
But as long as Shire Hall folks cling to the notion of a “regional-ready” water plant, we must continue to sleep with one eye open.
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