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Empty calories
When you put a TV dinner in the oven, can you really expect to pull a delicious gourmet meal out when the timer rings? No. The best you can hope for is a tray of calories and regret.
Similarly, earlier this year the County asked its consultant, Watson & Associates, what would happen if you took the same unaffordable waterworks plan Shire Hall has been kicking around for six years and divided it by fewer folks?
Unsurprisingly, what came out of the oven was a mushy, disappointing yet more expensive mess. It could hardly have been anything else. TV dinner in, TV dinner out. That’s the deal.
The consultant and the County’s finance director gave it an earnest shot. They tried all the settings on the food processor, but nothing helped.
Sadly, nothing will work until Shire Hall and its consultants (or maybe leave the consultants out of it for a while) begin to look at the ingredients— to understand the things going into the plan. Do we need this much salt? Could we do with less nitrate- laden meat? More vegetables? Maybe we could do with fewer calories in exchange for higher quality?
Until Shire Hall begins to ask basic questions about its waterworks infrastructure plans—challenges dogmatic assumptions, abandons its gold-plated dreams, and reverts to simple needs-based planning—it will continue to run up against the same problem: its grand waterworks plan is unaffordable. It always was. Always will be.
For a decade, the County has been gripped by the delusion that it could have big, beautiful pipes running from the depths of Lake Ontario through Wellington across the countryside to Picton—and that developers would pay for it. It’s proven a dangerously sticky hallucination to shake off.
In Wellington, Shire Hall has spent $50 million to extend infrastructure for a developer. That developer paid $13 million of the cost. Waterworks customers are on the hook to pay the rest, until, or more precisely, if, the developer decides to build homes in the fields north of the village. I will leave it to readers to speculate which decade that might occur.
So let’s overlay that experience onto the financial plan Shire Hall’s consultants are putting on the table this week.
In its report on Thursday, the consultants begin by assuming the Grand Regional Waterworks project will cost $280 million. (It won’t. Big infrastructure projects never go as planned, either in Prince Edward County or in big urban centres, where they have more experience and bench strength. And more taxpayers to fund their errors. See the recent LRT projects in Ottawa and Toronto. But sure, let’s start with $280 million.)
The consultants conclude that, if the County maxes out its debt, if developers finance $90 million up front, and if they build 171 units in Picton and Wellington every year for the next ten years, and if builders agree to pay $60,000 in development charges (the highest rate between the GTA and Ottawa), and if the new homebuyers manage to overcome the sticker shock and the ever increasing water rates of living in a new home in the County, it might just work.
It’s preposterous.
We’ve been down the path of an upfront deal before. We were burned. Badly. The developer got a huge boost in the value of its land, while waterworks users got the bill. Worse, the municipality was so badly outmanoeuvred that no new homes may be built in Wellington for the foreseeable future. New homebuilding in the village is now controlled entirely by a single developer—and it isn’t building. That is the enduring legacy of former leadership at Shire Hall.
The financial plan to be presented on Thursday relies on 171 new homes connected to municipal services each year for the next ten years. It’s absurd. The County has only issued 170 or more new home building permits once in its history. It has never issued 170 new home permits in municipally serviced communities—even when the market was booming.
So far in 2026, just four new home permits have been issued in Picton. None in Bloomfield and none in Wellington (for reasons described above). This data is from Shire Hall sources. They have the same information.
For a decade, Shire Hall’s residents have been fed a steady diet of wishful thinking—untethered from experience, track record or competence. Sadly, bad habits are
Finally, who is going to pay $60,000 in development charges to build a home in Wellington? It is nearly double the amount charged in Quinte West, Brighton and Belleville. The upshot is that such eyewatering charges will add a further barrier to build new homes in the County, meaning existing waterworks users will pay more. For longer.
Old capital plans need to be tossed out and new ones developed. County residents need an infrastructure plan that not only fits a lower expectation of population growth, but digs deeper into basic assumptions, including maintaining and expanding existing facilities on a longer cycle. All the ingredients need to be put back on the table. The junk needs to be thrown out.
The report before Council on Thursday is merely a slice-and-dice rehash of an ultra-rich program that was always, and remains, unrealistic, unreasonable, and unaffordable.
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