Tunnel vision

Some files need more attention than others. As a rule the ones requiring a more focused eye are most easily identified by the vast sums of money that flow through them—yet for our municipal council, it doesn’t always work this way.

Council will meet this week to discuss once more how its two economic development staff best spend their days. Sixteen folks will sit around and argue over this task or that; is this priority indeed a priority? Or if we should be developing our economy at all.

We will go round and round and some will remind others that this enterprise will be the subject of a special public meeting of navel gazing this summer, and that ‘we should just get on with it.’ But we won’t.

Then some will accuse others of micromanaging. There will be scoffs and denials— but of course that is exactly what they will be doing.

There seems to be no shortage of amateur economic development experts around the horseshoe, keen to dabble in a business few of them are qualified to tinker with. Yet they can’t resist.

We will spend $440,000 on economic development in 2011. Taxpayers will pay $300,000 of that.Total.

Meanwhile, over in Public Works, Robert McAuley will spend $400,000 before he brushes his teeth this morning. Four hundred thousand dollars is just walkingaround money in his department—hardly worth bending over to pick up off the ground.

As Mihal Zada reports this week (page 3) a committee of council approved a $140,000 addition to the brand new wastewater treatment plant in Picton. No one asked a ques tion. No one made a comment. It was approved in a bundle of other motions. It will likely have passed council on Tuesday and be done.

It is too bad— McAulay prepared a good report. He made a good argument. He did, however, raise some serious issues with the operation of the new plant— the highlight surely being the fact the plant was forced to dump raw sewage (though UV light-treated) into the creek during two wet and rainy patches this spring.

It turns out there are no guarantees when you spend $30 million that Picton’s crap isn’t going to end up floating in the bay. It seems the plant wasn’t designed for heavy rain.

But not to worry—there is a fix. The Ecowash 2000—at just $100,000—will make all our worries go away. Plus it has the added bonus of saving the municipality $11,300 in annual operating costs.

I find it hilarious that we can build a multimillion dollar sewage plant and still end up dumping sewage into the bay in our first few months of operation and yet boldly predict operational savings (to within a hundred dollars) on a piece of technology we don’t yet own.

Waterworks vendors must love Prince Edward County. It is the annuity that just keeps growing.

But even this is small potatoes. Late in May McAuley was forced to put council’s nose into the mess they had made in February. By way of background you will recall that a group of citizens, municipal staff and representatives spent the better part of six months working through the County’s waterworks systems— taking inventory, evaluating and assessing future expenditures.This was done to arrive at a sustainable and sensible set of rates and fees for waterworks users from Peat’s Point to Picton.

The committee recognized, as it was wrapping up its work, that it had not examined commercial and industrial rates as well as it could have done, but with nothing on the horizon and the need to provide some certainty to users and the County’s treasurer, the committee resolved to look at the matter later.

Then in February, in its enthusiasm to welcome a paying customer to the County’s eclectic industrial park, council giddily voted to waive water and wastewater connection charges.

I guess it seemed a good idea at the time. For the developer it meant a savings of $267,500 on a $113,000 lot. As a precedent for a new policy, the decision meant a loss of about $550,000 in waterworks revenue to 2018.

But as McAuley pointed out in May, connection charges are a zero-sum game: the money you forgive one category of user must be made up by another. McAuley proposed a couple of options—passing the additional cost to existing users or claiming property taxes from the development (equal to the connection charge) an d diverting these to the waterworks reserve fund.

The committee chose the latter. Actually all we can say is that council didn’t disagree with the commissioner’s recommendation—because it was approved. Once again the committee had no questions or comments. There was no reconsideration of whether council should be waiving fees to developers or whether indeed the fees are appropriate.

There were, it seems, more pressing things for council to worry about that day—things like where the two economic development staffers should sit— or what type of pencils they should use and so on.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca