Guelph’s roads and sewers are falling apart, and it seems clear that one way or the other we’re all going to be coughing up to fix them.
The question, really, is which pocket the money will come out of.
The city’s corporate services committee recently tackled the issue, considering a report from staff which floats the idea of an additional two per cent tax hike over the next 10 years specifically to take care of crumbling infrastructure.
The proposed levy would suck $4.2 million out of your pockets next year, and slightly more than that each year for a decade.
Infrastructure funding is a serious issue. In fact, the staff report notes, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario cites it as the top concern among its member municipalities. A previous Guelph staff report suggested every year the city allocates $23 million less than it would cost to properly maintain our roads, bridges, water and wastewater infrastructure.
During the corporate services committee, Coun. Bob Bell noted the city has been “defunding infrastructure” in favour of other expenses “without understanding what we’re doing.”
That’s being generous.
The infrastructure gap is not new, and officials must have realized over the years that every dollar they spend on something else is a dollar not spent maintaining that infrastructure. Now it’s literally falling apart under our feet, and we have to do something about it.
The staff report outlines several other options for addressing the gap; including a downtown levy; an additional fee for using city facilities; using new tax dollars from assessment growth to fund infrastructure rather than offset tax hikes; and using the annual Guelph Hydro dividend for infrastructure instead of pumping it back into the operating budget.
What do all those have in common? Fewer dollars in our wallets.
Mayor Cam Guthrie proposed a motion, which ultimately passed 3-2, that staff report back to the committee on “options for internal operational savings” by the end of June.
“I believe we should be looking in the mirror first before we go out to the community and ask them to cough up more money,” Guthrie said. “I don’t want to miss this opportunity for potential operational savings within if you’re going to be looking out.”
On its face, the mayor’s motion seems reasonable enough. Except that staff have been going through a constant state of barrel-scraping for the past several budget cycles. And that staff are always looking for efficiencies.
“Would staff only look at ways we can trim the budget or save costs if we direct them to do that or would this not be something we do on a regular basis?” Coun. Mark MacKinnon asked, coming to the point. “Wouldn’t that be a base assumption … that staff would be looking at ways to be effective all the time?”
Coun. Phil Allt called Guthrie’s motion “apple pie,” noting it asks staff to go and look for savings “without any specific targets.
“The redundancy is the part that bothers me,” Allt said.
Guthrie’s motion also felt like a back-door attempt to kick-start the service rationalization process he yanked from this year’s budget in a last-minute bid to save $450,000.
The mayor said a couple of times during the committee meeting his goal was not to revisit the issue of service reviews. But he also noted the city needs to start “really looking at the 375 services we provide our citizens, and that is exactly the type of high-level report I’d like back.”
If it walks like a service review and talks like a service review …
In Jury of One, Scott Tracey explores issues that matter to Guelph residents. A Jury of One will be published every Thursday on GuelphToday.com. Scott can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @scottjtracey
