No mandate

We did not sign up for this. Council did not earn a mandate to drain the resources of Prince Edward County. Forever. It has no popular basis for piling on forever costs and debt onto residents. It did not advise voters of its plan to foreclose funding options for a generation or longer. It didn’t ask. And voters did not consent.

The way representative democracy is supposed to work is that our elected representatives promise to do x, y, or z during an election campaign. When planning something big, something transformational, or something with an enduring impact, competing ideas are tested by the electorate. It is the only real opportunity in which residents are truly part of the conversation.

Your columnist attended many of the mayoral candidate meetings in 2022. Several more ward candidate meetings. I didn’t hear any candidate stand up promising to spend $100 million for a long-term care home, or $200 million for waterworks serving Wellington and Picton, or to spend $100 million on roads for the next four years. I didn’t hear anyone recommend a blank cheque for affordable housing.

To the extent that big capital works were discussed at all, it was said that someone else was paying. It was supposed to be developers and the provincial government who would be picking up the bill. Or most of it anyway.

But that didn’t happen. Neither developers nor the province have been keen to write cheques. Waiting by the mailbox hasn’t dampened Shire Hall’s enthusiasm for big spending, however. Shire Hall always knew that if all else failed it could raise taxes and ladle more debt onto residents’ backs. It’s always had a fallback plan.

So here we are. All the spending. None of the funding support. Any one of these projects would have been considered generational, transformational, and worthy of public debate in a previous term of council. Each would represent the largest expenditure ever made by this municipality. But there has been no public debate. There has been little curiosity among council members—only certainty it is doing the right thing.

But doing everything all at once means much more than increasing property taxes. It robs future generations of funding for their priorities and needs. The financial resources of this municipality have now been committed to perpetual roads programs and massive amounts of debt. Future choices are being foreclosed by Council’s decisions today.

So, let’s talk about debt. The province imposes a cap on how much each municipality may borrow. It’s a guardrail to steer local governments from veering into reckless, longterm spending decisions. The borrowing limit is based on how much revenue the municipality generates each year—mostly property taxes and user fees. However, in Prince Edward County, senior leadership persuaded the province that the debt incurred to fund waterworks expansion should not count against its borrowing limit. Shire Hall argued, persuasively, that since developers will—one day—pay a portion of this infrastructure cost, the debt incurred to fund it shouldn’t count against its cap.

Similarly, Shire Hall must borrow about $80 million of the $95 million cost to redevelop the McFarland home. However, according to a “landmark” ruling at the Ontario Land Tribunal, the municipality won’t count $60 million of this debt against its limit because, as Shire Hall argued, the province will pay this back over time. In the meantime, however, it’s residents of Prince Edward County who will fund this debt. Schrödinger’s debt—simultaneously ours and not ours.

Taken together, it adds up to more than $100 million of fresh borrowing that will not be counted against this community’s debt limit. The total will expand greatly if a similar development charges arrangement is struck in Picton to fund the regional water plant, intake pipe and pipeline from Wellington to Picton.

For a community of this size, it’s a choking hazard. It is an existential threat. The sheer magnitude of this leverage relies on everything going right and nothing going wrong. It assumes only gratefulness from residents for forever increases in taxes and user fees. It steals opportunities from future councils and future residents. It leaves the municipality without the flexibility to pursue opportunities or respond to emergencies.

The scale of this spending was not on the table in 2022. Council did not earn a mandate to drain this community of its resources now and into the future. By the time of the next election, likely all of this money will be committed. The next election will come too late to alter this trajectory. The money will be spent. The money borrowed. The die cast.

It will be too late to debate these choices. It will be done. All that will be left is for you to pay.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca