Right in the centre - Why can't we fix the roads?

Details

Published on Thursday, May 21, 2015

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

That’s a question I am often asked. It can be applied equally to all levels of government but mainly to municipal and provincial governments. The federal government gets involved in roads and bridges to some extent, but generally in very large projects. A case in point is the new Gordie Howe Bridge between Windsor and Detroit. The day-to-day, garden variety road projects fall to the municipality and the province to build and fix. Our roads are generally deplorable, in spite of a lot of work being done from time to time. So why are they so bad?

The answers are fairy simple.

One is that there is no real program to regularly fix roads, sidewalks or bridges. There’s a general feeling  that you only fix the disasters and in that way you squeeze the last little bit out of every chunk of pavement and concrete and avoid the inevitable replacement. I once asked a couple of questions of a public works manager, while in the mayor’s chair many years ago. I asked, “How many feet of side walk do we have in the Town of Neepawa?” The answer was, “Damned if I know!” So I asked “How long does a sidewalk last?. ”Again the response, “Damned if I know!” To that I responded, “Well, if you knew how many feet of sidewalk we had and how long a sidewalk lasts, then you could tell how many feet of sidewalk do we have to build every year.” The plain truth is that most jurisdictions don’t even bother to figure those things out.

The second reason is that even if municipalities do know what is required to keep up with repairs, they don’t set aside money to do so. Yes, they have reserves, but they are small compared to the task at hand. There is a shortage of money for roads and infrastructure. 

There are reasons that municipalities are short of money. They want to keep taxes low and that’s considered a good thing but it is being increasingly argued that higher taxes, the death knell of any politician, may have to happen.

The third reason is that money gets misallocated within the municipal system as well as the provincial system. At the municipal level, there is a very strong reluctance to actually run things at the real cost. Money that should go to roads often gets shuffled off to subsidize services that can be allocated on a user pay basis. Water is the main culprit. Everyone is scared silly of higher water rates and for good reason. However, in Neepawa, the water rates are heavily subsidized by the taxes. That’s simply not right. Water users should pay for water based on volume and they should pay the whole cost of supplying the water, the treating, piping the water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands of Neepawa tax dollars go to the utility and that has been a huge mistake. There are taxpayers who don’t have water and sewage but are paying for it through taxes and there are larger water users who are being heavily subsidized. It’s just not right.

Other things are being subsidized by the taxpayers and they shouldn’t be. Arts and recreation are being subsidized by taxes and they shouldn’t be. The amounts are small compared to the tax subsidy on water but they still shouldn’t be happening. Arts and recreation should be on a user pay basis and any group or organization that’s involved in arts or recreation should have tax-receipt charitable status. Many do but they rarely encourage the use of that status.

The biggest problem for municipal councillors and municipal staff is that they use last year as the template for next year. There’s rarely a thorough review of what needs to be done and then a plan put in place to make the changes that are needed. What worked, whether it worked well or badly, 20 years ago may be a poor template for today. People basically are afraid of change and because they have so little experience with change, they become very bad at managing change.

So, if we want to have our roads fixed, things have to happen differently than they have in the past. Otherwise, our roads will continue to crumble and so will our communities.