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Prince Edward County is surrounded by water. Fresh, clean, cold and drinkable water. It’s funny, then, that we pay so much for water from our taps. Prince Edward County residents pay among the highest water bills in Ontario. More than Toronto. More than Ottawa and Kingston. More than Muskoka. Collingwood and Cambridge. By a lot.
How is this possible? How have we managed to make the most expensive water when surrounded by a lake full of fresh, clean water?
Part of the answer is that ours is a complicated and dispersed waterworks. Six water systems. Two wastewater systems. Each is different from the other. Wellington gathers water from the lake. Picton from the harbour. Ameliasburgh pulls from Roblin Lake. Peat’s Point residents from a well. Rossmore water is purchased from Belleville (at a hefty premium). Consecon water from Quinte West. They have little in common—systems, parts, routines, and components are unique to each system. Training is complicated. But is this utility truly unique? Or even unusual?
Further, the County’s waterworks utility has too few customers. Just twenty households are served by Peat’s Point— among the most expensive water systems in Canada. A few hundred households in Ameliasburgh. Just a few thousand between Picton, Bloomfield and Wellington. As costs have escalated— unrelentingly for two decades—the burden upon existing households has increased. Feeble new homebuilding has failed to keep up. Our population is the same as it was 20 years ago.
But this describes the demographic trends in much of rural Ontario. We need to know how we manage this utility relative to other communities like Prince Edward County.
We must start by acknowledging the County is an odd duck. Not a county at all—but rather a single-tier city. As such, it must look after a broader range of services— police, ambulance, waterworks etc.— as regional governments and large cities do. But the County lacks the dense population base upon which such systems work best.
Few people. Big geography. Many responsibilities. It is not surprising at all that costs are higher.
But then there is Brant County. Brant is a rural region surrounding, but not including, Brantford. Brant County has 39,474 residents living in 14,400 homes spread across 817 square kilometres. Mostly rural with a sprinkling of villages and hamlets. (By comparison Prince Edward County has 25,704 residents, 11,305 homes scattered over 1,052 square kilometres.)
Brant County isn’t a county either. Like Prince Edward County, it is a single-tier city.
Brant County manages five water and four wastewater systems. Four water plants pull water from 18 wells. Another plant buys water from Brantford. Cainsville has the smallest water system serving 210 customers. The largest, in Paris, brings water to 7,700 customers.
Like Prince Edward County, Brant County’s population is mainly rural and geographically dispersed. And like the County, it manages a diverse mix of small waterworks infrastructure.
So how do we compare, as measured by our water bills?
My house in Wellington used 20 cubic metres of water in June and July. It cost $305.92. However, if I lived in Brant County, my bill would have been $136.88. It’s a big difference. For folks eking out a living on a fixed income or raising a family on the margins, it is punishing. And unrelenting.
The County didn’t get blistering water bills by accident, but rather by neglect. Council is tasked with its oversight—yet most of those who sit around the table aren’t customers of the service. They may be well-meaning, but they have no skin in the game. They don’t feel the steady squeeze. Few are watching over this utility. Fewer are asking questions.
I expect most Council members are unaware our water bills are more than double our closest comparable community. It is not their water. Not their burden.
Shire Hall has embarked on a $100 million project to expand and modernize the water and wastewater system. A new water tower rising from the ground beside the arena in Wellington signals the massive expenditures ahead. We are assured developers are paying the bulk of these costs—but we haven’t seen the agreements that support this claim.
This fall, please ask your municipal candidate about waterworks. Why are our bills higher than other communities? How can we improve the governance of this utility—to make it more responsive to its customers and stakeholders? And why, once elected to the soft chairs at Shire Hall, do some of our representatives stop asking questions?
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