Save Your Car, Drive on a Country Road

Jeff Green | Nov 10, 2011

Editorial by Jeff Green

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to visit both Montreal and Toronto within a 24 hour period, and spent time driving through traffic jams in both cities. Aside from the fact that at ay given moment I could gaze at more different people and vehicles than I see in a year driving around Frontenac, Lanark and Lennox and Addington Counties as I do my job, I noticed something else.

The roads, particularly the city streets, were horrendous; full of ruts and potholes. In Montreal, where the bridges are literally falling down, my car hit bottom twice on city streets. In Toronto, there are streetcar ruts on main streets, and the sides of the roads were crumbling. The cities were fun to visit but my car couldn't wait to get back to my own little gravel road in Central Frontenac, which thanks to a dry summer, is a pretty smooth ride, thank you very much.

All of our local townships devote more money, and attention, to roads than to anything else. The eat up 50% of local budgets. They are to our municipal councils what healthcare is to the Province of Ontario, an essential service whose cost escalates each year, pushing up taxes and taking money from other services.

Municipal Council's always a slave to provincial policy, have been changing thier budgeting processes in recent years in line with a provincially mandated capital asset management process. What that means is all tangible municipal assets, such as parks, buildings, equipment, and yes, roads and bridges, need to be inventoried and given a value. The depreciation of those assets as they age must then be calculated and the replacement cost and date must be accounted for in each budget.

What this exercise does is create a huge cash requirement down the road because in the 2012 budget the fact that a township must put money away to replace a truck they just bought but will need replacing in 10 or 15 years.

This is all very good long term planning, designed to minimize budget increases over years. But it also means that the millions of dollars it would cost to bring all the roads in a township to a provincial standard must be always on the mind of Council members.

South and North Frontenac Councils have taken this Capital Asset Management project very seriously. In South Frontenac the 2012 budget includes a pla to spend millions on roads and millions each year afterwards on roads and road equipment.

While this is prudent, it does mean that South Frontenac will remain fixated on roads. This will limit their ability to look at other community needs, such as recreation and social needs.

People are always complaining that we do not get much for our taxes in rural municipalities as compared to urban ratepayers. To a certain extent this is not true, as our municipal taxes do pay for policing, social welfare, library and other costs that are delivered by outside agencies. Still, there is something to a local council taking the welfare of its citizen's into its budget debate directly, rather than simply transferring moey elsewhere ad trusting ti will be sufficient.

The fixation with roads, which has only intensified under capital asset management, does take the focus ofg of everything else.

In the City of Toronto, while the roads are crumbling, the budget debate is over public transit, library service, social housing, recreation, etc.

Our Councils will talk only about roads and bridges and waste sites.

I would not suggest that a township such as South Frontenac ignore their road needs, but with roads that are better than urban roads today, more attention could be paid to the very real social needs of its citizenry.