Comment
Fair is fair
It’s fair game. If you live alongside a powerful, innovative and dynamic economy, it makes sense to leverage your proximity to that market’s energy—to your economy’s benefit. It is why we spend gazillions building bridges— both literally and figuratively—to the U.S. market. We do this to ensure commerce flows easily back and forth. It’s the essence and power of a free market.
Similarly, Belleville sees in Prince Edward County a powerful economic engine it hopes to leverage and exploit. It is evident each time you see a Bay of Quinte region ad featuring the beaches of Sandbanks provincial park, the wineries in Hillier and Waupoos and the shops in Bloomfield. These savvy marketers have grasped what County elected folks have been painfully slow to acknowledge—that Prince Edward County has developed a powerful, innovative and growing economic engine. Perhaps the most exciting growth engine in the entire region—Prince Edward County attracts high-value visitors in greater numbers each year—through an ever-longer portion of the year.
Our neighbours naturally want a piece of that. That’s fair. That’s the way a free market works. Besides, Belleville has a casino in the works—a casino whose business plan surely leans heavily on Prince Edward County’s drawing power.
So Belleville’s Mayor Taso Christopher will come to Shire Hall this week to personally brief council on plans to widen and expand the city’s intersection with the County.
To do this, the city is replacing the bridge that crosses the rail lines and expanding the roadway in all directions to accommodate greater traffic flow to and from the County. They plan to clean up the approach—vegetation, green space, trees and such—creating an attractive Gateway from Prince Edward County. Their words.
It is a courtesy call really. It is Belleville’s intersection. They have the $20 million they need, banked from gas tax money and other government programs.
I expect our council will be gracious and will wish them well. As they should.
Yet this moment can’t go by without talking about water. Seriously.
Faithful readers will recall that the County has an outrageous and grossly unneighbourly arrangement with Belleville for its supply of water to Rossmore and Fenwood Gardens. To be clear, the County owns and maintains the water pipe that lies under the bay between Rossmore and Belleville’s water plant. We pay for the processing and supply of clean drinking water only—not the distribution.
Keeping this in mind, note that Belleville residential water users pay a maximum of $1.65 per cubic metre. High-volume users pay as little as 75 cents per cubic metre. If a tanker were to pull up from Flint, Michigan, say, they would pay $2.13 per cubic metre. The County, however, drawing from the same source, pays at least $3.30 per cubic metre (as of 2013).
We, as neighbours, pay 64 per cent more for Belleville’s water than does a stranger showing up with a bulk water truck.
Here is what it means. The communities of Rossmore and Fenwood Gardens served by this water use, on average, about 250 cubic metres per day. This equates to a little over $300,000 per year that the County pays Belleville for this water. If Belleville charged the County the same amount it charges complete strangers, all County water users would save about $107,000 each year. If we paid what Belleville’s other high-volume users do, County water users would save a whopping $233,000 each year. That would help offset the deficits and rising costs of the County water system.
Fair is fair.
Belleville is now counting the days until it breaks ground on a casino. They need and want the payday it will bring. It’s a lucrative opportunity. The Thousand Islands casino in Gananoque, for example, has delivered $45 million to municipal coffers since it opened in 2002. It’s a lot of money.
Belleville’s payday is coming. Furthermore, the federal government is funding the city’s new and improved Gateway from Prince Edward County.
It’s time to have a serious discussion about putting this bad water deal behind us.
The County’s leadership have a job to do this week. County water users have been strung along for too long. But Belleville officials must know that dealing poorly with neighbours will hurt them in the long run.
The County is not without leverage at this moment in time. We need to apply it. This week.
Comments (0)