Neighbourhood Renewal a Good Investment

This is the Edmonton Examiner column as I submitted it in September 2008. I am posting it in July of 2010 but backdating it to the time of writing. It is posted for reference.

Members of city council received a technical briefing last week on a proposed way of attacking the city’s decaying local roads,  sidewalks, gutters, curbs and  sewers.   The good news is there is a more feasible and cost effective way to catch up; the bad news is that we’re doing the work in a tight-labour and rising-cost environment.

Our infrastructure specialists have been working with SMA Consulting on how to get the best bang for the buck city wide. The objective of the  proposed  strategy is: “to provide a sustainable long-term program for infrastructure assets (including collector and local roads, sidewalks, curbs, streetlights, multi-use trails, and drainage) that meet acceptable levels of service.”

As standards go, this means a city-wide average condition rating of 3.0 out of 5 or better; the objective also calls for the elimination of D- or F-rated deterioration of assets, which is marked by a state of irreparability and must be completely reconstructed.

In other words, we’ll aim to eliminate those teeth-jarring roads and heaving sidewalks, though not everything will be brand new.

Where those assets are beyond sprucing up on account of being left to deteriorate (there are 80 such neighbourhoods) the strategy calls for accelerating reconstruction of these neighbourhoods.

We’ve been doing two neighbourhoods a year these last few years, but we need to accelerate this to eight per year over the coming decade. This represents an expansion of the existing strategy.

The new aspect of the proposed strategy is preventive and calls for a stricter maintenance regimen for newer infrastructure to lengthen lifespan and protect our investment (e.g. sealing cracks in asphalt). This work is designed to prevent any of the other neighbourhoods from ever descending into D or F  condition.

By committing to doing  all of this work  as a package over the coming decades, we will be in a far better position to attract competitive bids and long term industry commitments for doing the work.

However, even after allocating more than a quarter of the funding from the province’s Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) over the next eight years, we remain  more than two billion short of what’s needed to undertake this work.

This is why we’re left looking at a dedicated annual tax increase earmarked for this work. The proposal is for a 4% increase per year for 10 years, which would get us back on top of the issue sometime in the 2020s.

If cost pressures taper off then we might not need  as much in a given year, but we  will need to begin now or else the situation will get worse –  and  simply more expensive to fix  in the long run as more neighbourhoods would decline into a state requiring total reconstruction.

I would strongly prefer to not raise these funds through property tax increases, but we still do not have access to other revenue streams which would be more equitable. Council continues to push for alternate revenue streams that are fairer and more linked to user impacts, but more work is needed here.