Road 38 roars back

Jeff Green | Sep 02, 2010

Editorial by Jeff Green

A few weeks ago South Frontenac Mayor Gary Davison was talking at Frontenac County Council about a county roads management plan.

He expressed the concern, which we will hear again and again as the push and pull between local townships and Frontenac County Council continues to be a feature of local politics, that money from his local ratepayers could be requisitioned by the county for roads in other Frontenac townships.

That debate will play out over the next couple of years. Would a county roads system be more efficient to administer, or would it merely add a layer of unnecessary bureaucracy and cost? Would putting all the roads together make it cheaper to maintain the key arterial roads or would it merely transfer money from the haves, such as South Frontenac, to the have-nots, such as Central and perhaps North Frontenac?

This is why Davison feels obligated, as any mayor from South Frontenac would, to put the concern about sending money to the county for roads at the forefront of any conversation that includes the words “county” and “roads” in the same paragraph.

The other thing that Davison said was that South Frontenac will be facing the re-build of 18 kilometres of Road 38 in the coming years. “We are just now looking at the 18 kilometres of Road 38 that is a monster that is about to bite us,” he said at the county meeting on August 11.

If Bill MacDonald takes a break from planning his campaign for the provincial Liberal Party nomination, that statement by Davison should make him smile just a little bit.

South Frontenac has been blissfully ignoring Road 38 ever since amalgamation in 1998, and now the road is like the proverbial chickens that are coming home to roost.

Back in the mid '90s, Road 38 was a provincial highway, but downloading was about to take place. The part of Road 38 that passed through what was then Portland Township and is now South Frontenac, was rebuilt by the Ministry of Transportation before the road was downloaded. The rebuild ended at the border between what became South and Central Frontenac. Phil Leonard, then Reeve of Portland and later Mayor of South Frontenac, has been given credit for helping the ministry see the value of investing in the portion of Road 38 that ran through his jurisdiction just before the road was downloaded.

After amalgamation and downloading, Central Frontenac was faced with their crumbling portion of the road, which arrived with a sum of money that was less than it would ultimately cost to rebuild the road. Bill MacDonald was Mayor of Central Frontenac for its first nine years, and he spent that entire time seeking money from the province to cover the cost of fixing Road 38, a sum that was greater than his township’s annual budget. It took about nine years of cajoling and complaining and even whining a bit, but the money eventually came and the road got rebuilt.

Meanwhile South Frontenac was sitting pretty on the smooth portion of the road.

While South Frontenac has been enjoying their road, time has crept up on it. Roads don’t stay smooth forever, and now they see a big, bumpy, cost coming their way - $10 to $15 million or so. They have put no money aside for that rainy day, and as Davison said, that day is now coming.

Up in North Frontenac, the township embarked on a paving program, a few kilometres a year, on their downloaded roads (Hwy. 509/506). The money that came with the roads covered that cost for several years and since that money ran out North Frontenac ratepayers have been covering the incremental costs each year.

South Frontenac Council has been meeting every week for years, talking about amalgamation, development, parks and recreation, waste management, etc. They have passed budget after budget, 13 of them since amalgamation, but they have no plan, no plan at all, for Road 38.

And guess what - the Province is not likely to come to the rescue any time soon. All of the infrastructure money is gone. While South Frontenac ratepayers got a library and an ambulance base for cheap because of infrastructure grant money, they are looking at paying for Road 38 themselves. That is, unless a county roads system can be put in place and the cost can be spread out over the ratepayers from all across the county.

Maybe the mayors from the other townships should be even more worried about that county roads plan than Mayor Davison is.