Principles first

A reader last week urged your correspondent to set aside criticisms of the municipality’s dangerous $300 million waterworks expansion plan for a week and instead offer some solutions.

I’ve been writing about municipal waterworks and escalating water bills for 20 years (to the understandable weariness of some readers). When water rates surged 12 per cent in 2006, it caught my attention. They have climbed relentlessly since.

When you opened your water bill last week, you surely noticed your household is paying at least 10 times more than you did two decades ago.

How did this happen? And why is it likely to continue to get worse? The affordability crisis in Prince Edward County has become ever more acute over the past five years. Something must be done to change this trajectory. So, yes, I have a few ideas.

Start with a clean sheet of paper. All that came before gets pushed into the waste bin. The premise was wrong. The principles were reckless. The risks too great. Start fresh.

Begin by hammering out some fundamental and non-negotiable principles. Listen to your experts (rather than self-interested developers) when they tell you how big the system needs to be. They’ve done this much more often than you have. If you don’t believe them, get another opinion. But stop insisting you must mortgage the future of this community simply because developers say so.

Other principles.

Get buy-in from the community. Don’t pave sensitive watersheds. Plan for expansion in the future. Negotiate a rock-solid financial plan for every development stage. Identify clear and defined payment obligations that bind all parties with a precise timeline. Growth must pay for growth. Not some fuzzy, undefined future vision—upon which existing residents foot the bill.

If developers wish to go further, faster— fine. We can talk about it. But they must agree to pay the entire cost—up front. Or build it themselves (to municipal standards). Nothing in between.

Employ folks with demonstrated expertise and experience in procuring projects of this scale. Folks with a track record of mitigating risk, implementing rigorous financial plans and holding all parties—developers, suppliers, trades, subs, etc.—accountable. Basic project management skills.

And then plan for things not going to plan—for they will. Be ready with backup plans and strategies when the complex apparatus goes pear-shaped. Keep stakeholders— the ratepayers who fund this utility—apprised at every step of the journey.

These are the principles—build a plan on them. Then, stick to it.

None of these notions is novel or rare. It is how you would manage a project in your household, your business or your farm.

Astonishingly, these principles were entirely ignored in this project. None was applied to the biggest infrastructure project ever imagined in Prince Edward County.

It was always a massive gamble. (Motivated by desperation? Hubris? The attraction of big, shiny and new?). Now that it looks like it was a bad bet, however, some on the council feel compelled to double down—praying their unlucky streak will soon end.

Shire Hall designed a waterworks system five times larger than its experts (Watson and Associates) estimated is needed in 25 years. It has spent $50 million already, but has received only $12 million from the developer. In exchange, it gave the developer the exclusive right to build homes in Wellington. A big mistake.

It must be undone.

This developer isn’t building homes. Worse, no one has built a house in Wellington for years. Nor can they. The developer has locked up all the remaining waterworks capacity.

That must be sorted first. Shire Hall must reclaim the remaining capacity in Wellington—even if it means giving back the $12 million. Unleash village infill lots—singles and compact subdivisions—that can be converted into homes sooner and fit the community’s needs.

The pipeline from Wellington to Picton is not on. It was always a wildly expensive notion and would have taken many decades to pay back—if ever. The risks were far too great.

In Picton, Shire Hall must take another look at the alternatives. Seriously and honestly. The good news is that municipal leadership has a good starting point—a 2014 engineering study that recommended extending the intake pipe into Picton Bay.

There is more work to do—and a new water plant to design, as well as an expansion to the wastewater plant to calculate. But we have time. Perhaps as much as a decade or more to work out a plan, figure out how to pay for it and then methodically implement it while keeping all stakeholders apprised. Step-by- step.

Meanwhile, Wellington water and sewage treatment plants are nearing capacity. The good news is both plants were originally designed to be expandable to fit the population as the village grew. Pull out another piece of paper and figure out how much expanding these plants will cost. Then, hammer out a financing plan with the developers who will benefit from these works.

Most of all, beware of wishful thinking—inside and out of Shire Hall. Council must steel itself against the self-interested pressure brought by developers. We can all agree that the County will benefit from a steady supply of new homes—in balance with demand as it ebbs and flows. But we must never do so by foisting mountains of debt upon residents just to make the dreams of developers come true.

That’s a pretty basic principle.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca