Looking forward

Road trips are great settings to sort out life’s big issues. They offer time to decompress. An opportunity to stare at a different horizon. To allow your playlist to present an uninterrupted soundtrack for the adventure and miles of road ahead.

The best part of a road trip—in regards to relationship mending, the focus of my column this week—is that your road trip partner can’t walk away. Neither can you. Both of you are compelled to talk (or sit in uncomfortable silence). You are bound to work through the issues. To return to some common ground. Road trips are polysporin for calloused and fractured human bonds.

So it is in this spirit that I propose a road trip with council and Shire Hall leadership. I don’t know how we all fit in my car—but I feel it’s worth a shot.

This community has endured a lot over the past eight years. It’s been a hard slog. I’ve observed Shire Hall for 21 years now— through five mayors, five managers and six terms of council. I’ve seen tense rivalries bubble up around the horseshoe, near fist fights quelled by cooler heads and plenty of tears. But not until the past couple of terms had I worried council would blunder so badly that it might compromise my ability to live here.

Some of the dysfunction was externally driven (pandemic), but much of it was selfinflicted (grand infrastructure ambitions). Some of it might have been well-intentioned. And while some of it worked, much of it didn’t. Some of it was plainly ludicrous.

But the point of roadtrips is not to look backward—or to rehash old irritants—but rather to look forward, to remind ourselves of the good things we have done together and how we might get back there.

My starting point is to remind everyone in the car—that Prince Edward County is a small rural community. It isn’t Toronto. It isn’t Markham. It isn’t on the verge of becoming something it never was.

Somewhere along the way Shire Hall decided it could be everything to everyone. It deluded itself—and many others—into thinking we should have all the shiny things of a bustling urban centre along with the pastoral, natural beauty that has forever defined this place. It was convinced the bill for this ambition would never come due. It was always a delusion.

We are broke.

Let’s be clear on this point before we get too far along in this journey. The municipality is broke. This isn’t my diagnosis—but rather the words of the County’s auditor, KPMG. Last summer, the auditor warned that the municipality had $38 million more in liabilities (money it owes) than assets (things it owns). This is called net debt—and it’s a bad place to be. There is stash of reserves or cash to bail it out.

There are hard limits to what this place can or cannot be—defined not by this newspaper or another–but by gravity.

This municipality is entirely reliant on its residents to fund everything it does—everything it wants to do. From big projects— long-term care home ($100 million), roads plan ($25 million annually), waterworks expansion ($300 million), County Road 49 (~$25 million) as well as the regular upkeep and maintenance on 88 crumbling buildings and 1,000 kilometres of decaying roads. It’s a lot. More than we can do. Municipal auditors want to know how the County plans to work itself out of this predicament.

The County’s financial position was always at odds with Shire Hall’s grand ambitions. There was nothing it couldn’t put on credit–even if it meant persuading a tribunal that our debt wasn’t really our debt. It was always hollow, and it was always going to end in tears. The only question was how deep Shire Hall would drag this place before it all fell apart.

That phase seems over now. Cooler, more rational heads seem to be driving the municipality these days—folks who understand the limits of an organization walking a fiscal knife’s edge.

So let’s use this road trip to reconnect with hard earth. Let us get back to loving this place—as it is. With all its frailties and foibles. Let us get over our infatuation with rapid population. Let us stop kidding ourselves that massive in-migration could ever fund overindulgence.

There is much to love about Prince Edward County—things that have nothing to do with grand ambitions and cheap buy-now-pay-later schemes. The County is still the place we found it. There is much to cherish and build upon.

We must still encourage and welcome growth. We must nurture new homebuilding. But on a more modest, dare I say, County scale. Conscious of this place. This community. The environment. The folks who call it home.

We may have to be a bit more humble about the place we want it to be. We’ve been too credulous over the past eight years—too trusting that things would work out. It has led us into financial trouble. But it’s not too late. We can fix this. We’re okay. But we have to stop spending money we don’t have.

It’s really that simple.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca