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Choices
Spring is a joyous time. A time of rebirth. Of surviving another cold, hard winter spent clinging desperately to the shores of Lake Ontario as snowbombs give way to blizzards, joined by long bouts of punishingly cold temperatures. But the rapture of an emerging spring is always short-lived in this place—quickly subsumed by the dread of venturing out onto County roads.
Every journey is an adventure. Every drive presents a question: will my wheels still be attached by the end of the potholestrewn drive? Each trip is a workout on the spine as the washboard road shakes every bone in your body and rattles the teeth in your head.
We are literally bound by our roads— snaking to every point, across the countryside and through many lowlands. Roads are the one thing all County residents share. Something we all know and experience. We are all road people. And we all want them to be better.
Politicians have an instinct for such things. They know that the promise of better roads generates votes. Few residents, however, ever hold them accountable for the fact that their roads haven’t improved over the past two decades—despite skyrocketing property taxes.
The promise is usually enough.
By the middle of last month, it was clear this was going to be a particularly punishing pothole season. As frost releases its grip, the result is washboard and divots galore.
By this point in the spring thaw, every council member is inundated by demands to repair roads in every corner of Prince Edward County—a network 1,047 kilometres long. Those calls are conveyed to the roads corps, which cannot possibly assuage the unhappiness.
And here is where we get to the math of the problem: Prince Edward County can’t afford its roads.
You’ve read those words here before. It is this time of year, however, that the sheer scale of the financial impossibility makes this hard fact most obvious. Our roads department is, at best, a triage unit scrambling to decide which roads should get care, and which are too weak for it to make a difference.
It isn’t about good. It’s about doing the best it can with the resources they have— which aren’t enough. Not even close.
Yet neither your council member nor Shire Hall will dare say so out loud. Every year at budget time, some will make grand pronouncements about their renewed commitment to roads and more often than not, they will succeed in extracting another million dollars or five from taxpayers, declaring they are “serious” about fixing roads. They aren’t. We don’t have enough money to be serious. Not even close. It’s all for show.
Simply put: we have too many roads and not enough people.
So we must make choices. Hard choices.
Previous leadership at Shire Hall chose to throw gobs of money it didn’t have at the problem—betting that thousands of new folks would soon arrive to help us fund their ambitions. It pegged the cost of maintaining and rehabilitating County roads at about half a billion dollars over 20 years. To meet this challenge, the team increased spending from about $7 million per year to $25 million per year—to be phased in over five years. Gasp.
So many problems. The cost won’t be $500 million in 20 years. Inflation, the vast unforeseen complications and emergencies, the cost overruns and the inevitable while-we- are-at-it pressures will push this cost much higher. Nor will $25 million per year be enough to keep up with the decay. Let’s not kid ourselves—the nature of money pits is that there is no bottom. Only darkness.
But let’s say we follow through with this idea.
The County currently spends about five per cent of its budget each year maintaining and caring for its roads. When road costs rise to 25 or 30 per cent of the County’s spending each year, everything changes. Or it ought to do.
To fund this path choices must be made: Fix roads or close arenas? Fix roads or close libraries? Fix roads or slash firefighting budgets? Fix roads or cut hospital funding? Fix roads or close daycare spaces? Taken together, this still won’t be enough.
Otherwise, we must vastly increase our already staggering property tax bill.
The tax levy is $60 million this year (three times what it was 20 years ago, and double the amount extracted just a decade ago). Fixing County roads may require a whopping 30 per cent increase to your tax bill.
Then there are the folks who can’t pay more— those who are already feeling strangled by rising taxes and water bills. It will be necessary to expand relief programs—meaning that instead of 30 per cent more, it will be much higher still. Along with unrelenting increases.
Or—and I understand this is a radical thought— we might learn to live with our poor roads. We might learn to live with the spring upheaval. Convert some back to gravel to lower maintenance costs. Buy a few more graders and do the best we can with what we have.
We might one day find peace with our roads— even through washboard springs. Otherwise, we must brace for much higher costs, with no certainty that they will make a discernible difference.
Taxes and water bills have radically reshaped this community. Rising costs are erecting ever-higher hurdles for those who can and cannot afford to live here.
It raises the question: Better roads for whom?
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