Some honest talk about our roads

Editor’s note: The full KPMG report can be found here.

We can’t afford our roads and bridges. That is, the 12,000 households that pay property taxes in this municipality cannot manage the hundreds of kilometres of roads and dozens of bridges thrust upon this and other rural communities in 1997 and 1998.

This isn’t opinion, it’s math. Math you and I paid for. Let us walk through the numbers provided by KPMG, an accountancy, in 2014. So, why aren’t you hearing this from Shire Hall? From your council member? Your mayor? Our road network is the most expensive and burdensome asset we own in Prince Edward County. Shouldn’t we have an honest discussion about roads?

Roads last about 50 years. We have about 1,100 kilometres of roads in Prince Edward County. The lifecycle cost (to build and maintain these roads over this 50 years) is $811.5 million according to KPMG in its asset management plan prepared for the County (I will post the full study on The Times website).

Accordingly, the average annual cost to build and rehabilitate the County’s road network is about $16.2 million each year. Every year. Plus inflation. For ever.

The County only spends about $6 or $7 million on rebuilding its roads and bridges each year. That’s all we can afford. Every year we fail to overcome this road rebuilding threshold— that is spend at least $16 million—the balance gets added to the total. The gap grows wider. It’s a problem.

The math is crystal clear: our roads are decaying faster than we can fix them.

Occasionally, in a bid to appear “serious”, council throws an extra million dollars or so, of your tax dollars, into road reconstruction. It is neither serious nor meaningful.

In December, in a particularly acute bout of seriousness, council agreed to spend $9 million on rebuilding its roads in 2018 (it’s an election year, after all). To do this, they had to raise the tax levy by 5.3 per cent.

In very rough terms, one million dollars equals a 2.8 per cent increase to the levy. In order to raise the $16 million needed to prevent roads from decaying further this year, council would have to hit taxpayers with an 25.2 per cent increase this year—and then sustain this increase in revenue, for ever.

It is not entirely clear that everyone around the council table understands the intractable nature of the problem: that the prospect of good roads is moving away further away from them, not closer.

Then there is the bizarre notion that we can and should fix County Road 49. On paper, this project is estimated to cost $22 million dollars. It will likely cost much more. Even if the federal and provincial government helped out, we don’t have $7 million laying around to fund our portion. That represents the entire annual budget for road building in the County. This says nothing at all about the merit of such a project—only that we don’t have the means to do it. Worse, it is irresponsible to think we can—and worse still to let residents believe it is possible.

There seems little curiosity. Little need to burrow into the problem. To understand it, and explain it to residents.

Year after year, the hole gets deeper. Roads get worse, more expensive to repair and yet, there is little discussion. Even when folks come to Shire Hall to complain about the dangerous condition of their road, council won’t talk about it. All these residents get is a flat explanation that a superficial repair would be wasted money since the road base has deteriorated beyond recovery. It may be a factual explanation, but it is not nearly a complete answer.

Lacking a solid grounding in the issues and the economics of County roads, council does the unpardonable: spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Union Road, an entirely redundant few-hundred-metres-of-road, used primarily as a shortcut for commuters to Belleville. Or $800,000 on a stretch of winding road adjacent Sandbanks Provincial Park, that serves exactly zero homes.

The truth is that we can neither borrow nor tax enough money to reverse the decay in County roads. That doesn’t mean, however, we should continue to stick our head in the sand.

We commit $6 to $9 million of a $35 million tax levy each year on our roads. That’s a big portion. So let’s talk about how we spend it.

Here are some potential discussion topics: What is the logic behind which roads get rebuilt and which don’t? With just a small pool of money, what are the principles governing how it is used? Is it return on investment? Or does the commercial value of the road relative to the County economy play a role, as the businesses on Closson Road will argue?

Which roads are we consciously allowing to decay into impassability? Which roads should be returned back to gravel? And, why? Who are making these decisions? Whose interest are they looking out for?

These are all questions we should be talking about. Council first and foremost. Right now.

I wrote the commissioner of public works last summer, specifically suggesting that a special meeting be convened to deal exclusively with the County’s roads problem. This after hearing a few comments from council members that indicated they had not yet grasped the scale of the challenges.

The commissioner declined the suggestion, saying that council would talk about the issues during budget deliberations in December. Those budget discussions, authorizing $80 million of spending, were rammed through in three short days. There was little conversation about roads. Nor our inability to fund them.

The County’s senior finance staff did, however, attempt to stimulate conversation during those budget deliberations, by adding a new budget column identified as “Unfunded” in the 2018 roads budget. The column listed about $20 million of roads in need of reconstruction, but for which there was no money—no funding source. This only served to confuse council further. For a few moments some actually believed there might be some magical way to get their roads rebuilt.

When it was pointed out, there was no actual money for these projects, they quickly deleted the $20 million and moved on. The unicorn turned out to be just a tired, old horse.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca