Regional Roads presentation fizzles

Jeff Green | Feb 05, 2020

I hope readers will grant me this assumption – the idea of a virtual county roads system in Frontenac County, or anywhere else, is hard to understand. A real road goes somewhere, but a virtual one?

In fact, most of us never think about who owns the roads that we drive on every day. We know the difference between gravel roads and paved roads, two lane highways and four lane highways, but the fact that every road that we ride on is owned by someone rarely, if ever, crosses our minds.

For municipal politicians, however, road ownership is a big thing, and in Frontenac County it has been a major source of concern, and a major driver of tax increases, for over 20 years, ever since municipal amalgamation in 1998.

At that time, not only were the four current Frontenac townships created, but two other former Frontenac townships, Pittsburgh and Frontenac, became part of the City of Kingston. At the same time, the ownership of most of the major arterial roads in Frontenac County changed hands. The provincially owned Highway 38 became Road 38. The same thing happened to Hwy 506/509 in North and Central Frontenac.

The difference between a provincial road and a municipal road is all about who pays to maintain it. Roads 38, 509 and 506, as well the major roads on Howe and Wolfe Island, have been paid for through municipal taxes since 1998. Before then, they were paid for out of the provincial budget.

This scenario presents a problem. They are expensive roads to maintain and the area is sparsely populated. And when the roads need to be rebuilt every 25 years or so, local municipalities do not have the resources to pay for it.

Before Road 38 was downloaded, the section between the 401, and the border between South and Central Frontenac, was rebuilt by the province. The section between Central Frontenac and Highway 7, was not.

It took almost 8 years of relentless lobbying to obtain a provincial grant to rebuild Road 38 in Central Frontenac, and even then, the township had to take out a loan, and ratepayers in Central Frontenac are just now paying that loan off.

In the meantime, the section between the 401 and the Central Frontenac border is now almost 25 years old. It is by far the busiest stretch of road in Frontenac County and many, many Frontenac County residents use it every day to go to work in Kingston or Napanee or points east and west along the 401. It is the single most important piece of road infrastructure in the region and it is failing, in some spots it has already buckled.

South Frontenac is in a relatively strong financial position. Still, rebuilding Road 38 will require support from other levels of government, a large infrastructure grant to help cover a $10 million project, for the South Frontenac portion. Other key commuter roads in South Frontenac are also in need of rebuilding. Battersea Road ($6 million), Perth Road ($5 million), Sunbury road ($1.5 million) and Bedford Road ($1 million) are all listed for reconstruction within five years.

These cost estimates and the five-year time frame all come from a report by consultants KMPG, which was presented to a joint meeting of Frontenac County and the four Frontenac townships last Wednesday (January 29).

The KPMG report, which was presented by Bruce Peever, looked first at a previous study from 2013, by the Watson Group. The Watson Group concluded that financing the capital costs on a county-wide basis instead of township by township, would “smooth, and therefore minimise, future tax impacts to all county constituents,” and ultimately deliver “a better and more consistent level of service to all residents and businesses.”

The KPMG report then looked at how successful Frontenac County townships have been at obtaining road and bridge construction grants since 2014 as compared to its most immediate neighbours; Lennox and Addington, Hastings, Lanark and Leeds Grenville.

Frontenac County was in the middle of the pack for the first two years, but did very poorly between 2016 and 2018. According to the KPMG report, in 2018 alone, “Frontenac County received an average of $3 million less in grant funding than their comparator group.”

The chart that preceded that text in the report, does indeed show Frontenac County lagged far behind each of the comparators over the three year period. But the claim about receiving $3 million less in 2018 is not supported by the data. None of the comparators received $3 million in 2018, but Frontenac was about $2 million below the others.

As well, although the report only looks to the end of 2018, it was prepared in the 4th quarter of 2019, and in 2019 Central Frontenac alone received a $3 million dollar grant. Presumably then, if 2019 were included in the report, it would show a bounce back for Frontenac County.

In presenting the report, Bruce Peever pointed out that the future of granting programs under the current government is “uncertain, and it is difficult to project from the recent past into the near future as far as provincial granting programs are concerned.”

Nonetheless, the report concludes that if Frontenac County was able to apply for grants, in addition to the four Frontenac townships, the chances of success would be greater. All of the other comparators have county roads systems, that are eligible for grants, except for Hastings County, but Hastings County has fourteen local municipalities applying for grants and Frontenac County only has four. The basic logic of the argument for a virtual Frontenac County roads system is therefore that one more grant application can be sent in for every grant that is available and Frontenac would receive, over time, more in grants than otherwise.

As to how this should be set up, the KPMG report said it should be done the way Lennox and Addington does it. Local townships handle all maintenance and the county handles capital costs on county designated roads. The county has an engineer and crew on staff to handle the county roads, and the report says that Frontenac County should do the same, at a cost of $625,000 per year.

In responding to the report, North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins said “I understand the intent of all this, to get more grants, but I find the charts, and the report as a whole, confusing, and I don’t follow the conclusions.”

Frontenac Islands Mayor Dennis Doyle said “collectively we are leaving a lot of money on the table. $625,00 a year is a lot, but we spend a lot on engineering consultants and you can’t necessarily get a hold of them when you need them.”

South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal, in line with the thinking of his own council, which discussed the report at their own council meeting the previous evening, said “we feel the need to work with the existing public works departments and staff. I don’t see why we would want to create another level of bureaucracy to do this. I’d like to see a model where we do this without creating a new department.”

The whole matter has been kicked back to KPMG to prepare an implementation report, taking into account what was said at the meeting and the direction that the provincial government is headed in, to the extent that it can be determined.

But given that each of the townships will have to agree before county roads, virtual or otherwise, can be established, it is not clear that the project will move forward in 2020, just as it languished after the Watson report in 2013.

What is clear, however, is that certain major roads need to be rebuilt, and soon, and it will take grants to get rebuild them.

Would county road status make that happen more easily? No one can guarantee that.

Frontenac County chief administrative officer Kelly Pender did not say much during the presentation and the subsequent question period. He did say one thing at the very end, however.

“Every other county in Ontario has received more in infrastructure grants over the last five years than Frontenac County has. Every one.”