Minister Meets mayor On Hot Bridge

Jeff Green | Jul 30, 2015

Ontario Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Jeff Leal, was in Sharbot Lake briefly on a hot Tuesday morning to announce a new round of infrastructure funding.

Using the backdrop of a project that received 90% of its funding from the first round of the Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund (OCIF) - namely the removal of an aging bridge on Road 38 over the Trans-Canada Trail - Leal announced that $50 million will be made available for projects in so-called rural communities in 2016.

For the purposes of OCIF, municipalities with populations under 100,000 are defined as rural. Municipalities have until September 11 to file an expression of interest for 2016 funding. Unlike other infrastructure programs, which tend to be funded as a three-way partnership (1/3 provincial, 1/3 federal, and 1/3 municipal) OCIF funding is 90% provincial and 10% municipal.

Central Frontenac Mayor Frances Smith thanked the province for providing the funding for “an improvement to Road 38, which as you can see is a busy road that is used by many of our permanent residents to access work, and by seasonal residents in North and Central Frontenac to get to their cottages.”

Minister Leal, who spent 18 years on Peterborough town council before being elected as an MPP in 2003, said that when roads were downloaded by the Harris government in 1999, Eastern Ontario was the hardest hit region of the province, and the McGuinty and now Wynne governments have been attempting to address the resulting infrastructure gap for the last 12 years.

Road 38 was one of the roads that was downloaded by the Harris government. Central Frontenac received a matching grant to resurface it in 2006, and is still paying off its own share of those costs.

Leal did not indicate on Tuesday that the Wynne government is considering taking back responsibility for any of the roads that were downloaded under Mike Harris. Instead, he talked about partnerships and the OCIF program.

The section of Road 38 that runs through South Frontenac, which was resurfaced by the Ministry of Transportation before the road was downloaded in 1999, has been earmarked for re-surfacing by South Frontenac staff, but the costs are too great for the township to cover on its own.