Hastings County Council is fed up with the lack of support offered to rural Ontario municipalities by Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government.
During a January 28 meeting, council voted to send a letter to Ford and Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma expressing its concern over the lack of infrastructure funding provided to small rural and northern Ontario municipalities.
Don DeGenova, the mayor of Tweed, Ont., spearheaded the motion. He says he spoke with Surma about the issue at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference in January, but was told no funding was available.
“Our infrastructure is old. It’s crumbling,” he says. “I’ve got three bridges that I expressed to [Surma] I had to reduce the tonnage to three tons, which means a fire truck can’t cross it, an ambulance can’t cross it, a school bus can’t cross it, and heavy farm equipment can’t cross it. She couldn’t care. She didn’t even flinch.”
Tweed isn’t the only municipality dealing with outdated infrastructure. A 2021 report from the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, the province’s watchdog, found that 45 per cent of municipal infrastructure in Ontario needed repairs, which would cost approximately $52 billion.
According to DeGenova, the way infrastructure projects used to work is that the federal government would pay a third, the provincial government would pay a third, and the municipality would cover the final third. But that’s no longer the case. Under Ford’s government, municipalities must apply for specific grants. The applications are often 600 to 800 pages long. “I can’t keep directing my staff to fill them out because I’ve got limited staff,” says DeGenova.
The provincial government has rejected each application Tweed has submitted. Instead, DeGenova sees the money filtering into larger municipalities. For instance, Prince Edward County received $20 million from the provincial government in January to rehabilitate a county road.
DeGenova theorizes that these other municipalities receive the funding because they’re swing ridings. Municipalities such as Prince Edward County and Quinte West aren’t guaranteed Conservative wins, he points out, which could explain why they received large sums of provincial funding leading up to the snap election called by Ford on January 27.
“We’re not a swing riding. We always vote the same way. We always vote Conservative,” says DeGenova.
Without additional funding, municipalities such as Tweed are forced to borrow money from the provincial government. Municipalities are required to pay these loans back to the provincial government over a set number of years with interest. “By the time you pay off your loan, it’s almost as much as what the original loan was,” says DeGenova. “And they won’t let you pay it off early, like a bank. You’re committed.”
He adds that this set-up makes him nervous about borrowing money. He doesn’t want to burden future councils with debt. Tweed is already paying off $750,000 in loans to the province.
The only other option for funding infrastructure is paying directly out of the municipality’s reserves. According to an asset management plan DeGenova submitted to the provincial government last year, Tweed would have to bank $13.1 million a year in taxes over the next 15 to 20 years to pay for all the needed infrastructure. “I’m looking at over $200 million,” says DeGenova.
And that doesn’t account for inflation over the coming years. In 2019, a new fire truck cost $450,000. Today, Tweed is paying $1.1 million for a new truck.
DeGenova is trying to figure out ways to reach that $13.1-million-per-year goal but so far is struggling for solutions. The town currently collects $6.1 million per year in taxes and that’s with a 17 per cent bump last year. In an ideal world, he says, the Hastings County letter would convince the provincial government to chip in for municipal infrastructure again. But he isn’t holding his breath.
“When you can’t get any assistance from either level of government, and then your taxpayers get upset because you’ve got to raise their taxes to be able to accommodate and address the needs that your community has, because all costs are being downloaded to municipalities all the time. It’s frustrating,” he says.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the provincial election was happening on January 28th.
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