A truck pulling a trailer trundles down a municipal road after crossing a bridge. The Rural Municipalities of Alberta says an infrastructure deficit threatens the future viability of many of the roads, bridges and utilities in 85 per cent of the province’s landmass. Photo by iStock
A far-flung constellation of infrastructure requires strategic reinvestment to help keep Alberta’s economy humming, says an association representing municipal districts and counties.
In a five-week public awareness and advocacy campaign launched Jan. 15, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta is sharing details about a deficit it calculates will reach $33 billion this year, assuming grant methods and amounts don’t change.
The deficit — an estimate of the dollars needed to reach condition targets set by the RMA — stood at $17.25 billion last year and could reach nearly $41 billion by 2028, the organization has calculated.
Kara Westerlund, RMA president, hopes the campaign dubbed Closing the Gap will jumpstart a collaborative approach for reducing the infrastructure deficit for the benefit of all Albertans.
“In no way, shape or form” is the RMA saying that the infrastructure deficit must be eliminated immediately, Westerlund said. But the deficit does require that multiple provincial ministries and the federal government work with the RMA to find solutions, she said.
“We know that this is going to take a lot of heads meeting at the table and being collaborative,” said the Brazeau County councillor. “We see this as something that we can work together on for long-term and sustainable solutions that are going to work for the entire province.”
At risk are many of the critical roads, bridges, water plants and sewer lines serving the province’s less densely populated areas. They comprise the transportation and utility infrastructure managed and often owned by Alberta’s rural municipalities that fall under the RMA umbrella.
The RMA represents 69 municipal districts, counties and other generally unurbanized areas of Alberta, from Mackenzie County and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo in the north to Cardston, Warner, Forty Mile and Cypress counties in the south.
Loss of infrastructure condition present increasing risks to safety, reliability and usability, campaign materials say.
Week 1 of Closing the Gap centered on an infrastructure funding gap and the taxpayer burden. The second week, under way now, is about the economic importance of rural infrastructure to Alberta.
Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams said he welcomes a collaborative approach. But he emphasized that infrastructure maintenance is the responsibility of local jurisdictions.
The association has been “a terrific partner,” Williams said, “and I’ll give them credit: they gave me a heads up about their campaign.”
The minister continued: “I think they’re right to initiate it. We need to agree that there is a deficit when it comes to infrastructure. We also need to try and find new and thoughtful ways of trying to address that.”
But maintaining municipal infrastructure is “fundamentally a municipal responsibility.”
If the solution proposed is that the province “increase taxes for infrastructure that we don’t own, then that will be a challenge,” said Williams, the UCP’s member for Peace River.
The government is “under pressure across the province when it comes to competing demands and priorities,” Williams said.
“I want to make sure I support the municipalities that don’t have the economies of scale that we see in some of the larger population municipalities. So I’m open to conversations on that.”
Data compiled from a variety of programs pegs provincial money provided to rural governments at about $660 million over the past three years. About $590 million of that is capital funding and the remaining $70 million is operational.
Williams said that “my hope is to continue to be able to support” rural Alberta municipalities.
“But the big question here is the very big capital ask that we’re going to have to address together when it comes to the infrastructure deficit.”
The RMA contends rural infrastructure has a disproportionately large provincial impact.
Residents, their farms and other businesses rely on rural infrastructure. But so do industries like agriculture, logging and resource development, said Westerlund.
Rural Alberta — or at least the part of it represented by the RMA — generates 28 per cent of the province’s gross domestic product across 85 per cent of its land mass, the association says. Under 15 per cent of the province’s people live in RMA municipalities.
It’s easy for urban Albertans to misunderstand the role the countryside plays in their well-being, Westerlund said. And rural residents themselves take infrastructure for granted.
Infrastructure “doesn’t get the flashy headlines. This is the non-sexy side of government. I dare say, it’s a boring topic.”
She continued: “But when your toilet doesn’t flush or you can’t get water from your taps or your 15-minute drive home increases by an hour because a culvert’s out or a bridge is closed and the municipality can’t fix it, all of a sudden infrastructure is front and centre and people are angry.”
The issue of decaying infrastructure returned to the top of the news scroll recently, when the Bearspaw South feeder main in Calgary broke open for the second time in 18 months, forcing water restrictions on 1.6-million people in and around the city.
The feeder is patched for now, but local authorities say the repairs are a short-term fix.
The Bearspaw failure is a timely urban example of an infrastructure deficit demanding its toll, said Westerlund. Rural examples directly affect far fewer people and usually go unnoticed beyond their local area.
“When a road or bridge is shut down and it affects 20 to 30 residents and a part of an industry, it doesn’t grab the headlines we need to get the province’s attention,” she said.
RMA entities own 75 per cent of the province’s bridges and culverts, Westerlund said. “That’s massive. And it’s not cheap.”
Members have 135,000 kilometres of road to maintain, clear and keep in good working order, amounting to 70 per cent of Alberta’s total road network. The municipalities also operate and maintain 30 per cent of the province’s water and waste-water systems.
Westerlund said the problem’s roots largely come from reductions in provincial and federal funding, combined with the effects of other downloading on the tax base.
Add to that increased construction costs and other inflationary pressures, and it’s “impossible to keep up” without extra help from senior governments, she said.
