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The limit of hope
It was not the outcome water ratepayers were hoping for. By now, many had expected Council would have understood the outrageous risk they were taking on behalf of water users in Prince Edward County. They expected Council, senior leadership, or waterworks staff to see that their project was much too big. And that the result will be rapidly escalating water rates for existing residents for a long, long time. They saw it as obvious.
Nevertheless, last week Council approved yet another big step toward expanding Wellington’s waterworks for the benefit of a developer. It has now committed $44 million toward this $100 million project.
Shire Hall believes the developer will build homes. Thousands of them. Shire Hall believes nearly a million square feet of commercial development will come with this wave of growth. The funding for this plan depends upon it. None of it works unless this happens—and soon.
But what if Shire Hall is wrong? What if the anticipated homes do not get built? The question has been posed to Shire Hall hundreds of times since this project was devised. Yet it goes unanswered still.
More than $75 million of the $100 million Wellington waterworks expansion project costs are expected to be funded by development charges. Council is betting your water bill on it.
But what happens when development falls short—or fails to materialize at all? In that event, we are all in deep, deep trouble. It may explain why Shire Hall refuses to answer the question.
No one believes a population boom is coming to Wellington. It hasn’t for a century. The same number of people—give or take a few hundred—have lived in Prince Edward County for 140 years. The forces that keep the population in this narrow band don’t change overnight—or in a few decades. There is no industry or employment to drive the wave of population growth required to make this plan work. Folks retire here. Their circumstances change, and they leave.
Sure, a few homes will be built, but not the hundreds and hundreds needed to fund this grotesquely oversized plan. If Council were truly interested in serving this community, it would incentivize affordable homes, apartments and townhomes—places that folks can graduate to when their homes become too much to manage. Instead, it is building massive, oversized waterworks for developers who have no stake in this community.
The upshot is that Shire Hall is making life in the County more precarious. Less affordable.
Water rates in Prince Edward County are already among the highest in the province. Just a decade and a bit ago, ratepayers paid a flat fee of about $300 a year for water and wastewater in Picton and Wellington. This year, a family using 200 m3 of water will pay $2,330. Next year, $2,413. The year after that, almost $2,500. These rates are already set. Locked in.
But 2027 could be spectacular. This is when a new rate structure kicks in. Every dollar Shire Hall spends on this project that it fails to collect in development charges is a dollar that must be found elsewhere— and the only other source is you, the water ratepayer.
So far, Shire Hall and Council have committed $44 million to this project. It has no certainty—nor the likelihood—that development is coming to pay for it. We are now in the fourth year since this plan was dumped on waterworks users and, so far, it has produced no new homes or development fees. Farm fields are still growing crops. They will be seeded again in the spring. All we have is a growing list of shiny new waterworks.
However, a faint glimmer of light emanated from last week’s meeting. On its way to awarding the trunk line tender, Council committed to reviewing the entire project. A compromise of sorts. Council agreed that a third party should have a ‘second look’ at Wellington’s master servicing plan, its development charges background study, growth forecasts, project scope and financing against current economic and environmental assumptions. It agreed to do so before the water and wastewater plants are tendered.
This is a significant win—though it comes too late to avoid cancelling the trunk lines under the Millennium Trail. A third-party review will surely discover what residents already know—the project is too big, too expensive, and based on assumptions of growth that were always in the realm of fantasy.
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