A reoccurring theme these days in terms of municipal planning is how to manage the cost of upgrading ever aging infrastructure.
The situation was certainly an underlying theme at a recent public meeting host by the City to discuss this year’s scheduled work on Dracup and Mayhew Avenues.
At the meeting Trent Mandzuk Director of Public Works with the City said when it comes to complete reconstructions of streets, the City has limited dollars, so must make choices in terms of which streets are done, and when.
“We’re doing the best job with the dollars that we have,” said Mandzuk. He went on to explain the city has $150 million in roadway assets, part of some $1 billion in overall infrastructure assets which includes things such as the sewage treatment and water treatment facilities.
“It’s a huge amount of assets we’re responsible for,” he said, then added many of those assets, in particular roadways and underground infrastructure are aging.
Mandzuk said as a roadway ages it actually deteriorates more quickly the older it gets.
“They’re bad now, but they’re going to get worse,” he warned.
And as roadways age so too do the waterlines and sewer lines and other infrastructure below the ground.
Most of the underground pipes in Yorkton are some 60-years old, and “there is pipe from the early 1900s still functioning,” said Mandzuk. “It’s been operational for 100 years … It’s due for replacement.”
The age of the infrastructure and the sheer amount of it buried under city streets is the issue.
When a city of only some 20,000 residents begins discussing a project such as the complete reconstruction of Broadway, with a price range of some $50 million attached, it is easy to see the reason for concern.
It is a problem that is not isolated to Yorkton.
Carl Neggers with SM solutions, a keynote speaker at the Saskatchewan Association of Watersheds Conference held in Yorkton last week, talked about the broader situation.
Certainly there is a cost to maintaining safe water, and that cost is going to grow.
“There is a significant infrastructure deficit in water,” he said, adding it will be “very expensive” to replace that aging network.
“If you could only see what’s under the ground you would be shocked.”
However, it remains crucial systems be in place “to clean the water the way we need to,” said Neggers who was formally the Director General of the federal government’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA).
While Neggers noted what we do must be “more sustainable and more affordable” moving forward, we are also certain in terms of water we know what can happen when systems fail.
If a system fails we can end up with dramatic situations like the one on Flint, MI “where they didn’t have access to clean reliable water,” he said.
And we have seen that before with Walkerton, ON, and closest to home North Battleford.
In terms of water Yorkton is positioned well with its new water treatment plant, but the reference to infrastructure concerns at the SAW Conference only go support what we are seeing locally in terms of how a municipality will deal with the growing renewal deficit moving forward.
