In what has so far been a dull municipal election campaign, an old-school criticism of any sitting mayor and city councillor running for re-election is being rolled out by Cameron Stolz.
Simply put, Stolz is talking up roads and especially the fact that the current city council cut the road rehabilitation budget by $2 million - from
$7 million to $5 million in the 2017 and 2018 budgets.
He's not wrong.
For the past two years, city council scraped $2 million away from roads and plowed that money into sidewalks and parks.
In February 2017, as city council considered clawing money out of the roads budget, the city's engineering and public works general manager Dave Dyer offered a warning.
He told council that with the reduction, city staff would still be able to keep up work on the arterial and collector roads but local roads would be neglected.
"We've been able to make some great headway on the local roads in the last three years with the $7 million," he said. "That will suffer for sure and we will have to look at micro-surfacing treatments more so in areas where we can use it. We can't use it in all areas where we have issues with our local roads."
Coun. Garth Frizzell tried to sway his council colleagues to spare some of the road budget, first with an additional $1 million in spending for roads through a tax increase and then with pulling back $600,000 from the additional $2 million for sidewalks and parks, but both of his efforts failed.
The problem is actually even worse than Stolz indicates, according to the City of Prince George's 2018-2022 Provisional Financial Plans report.
The preamble of that report notes that the city has not increased the $5 million road rehab levy since 2013, meaning that inflation has been chipping away at the roads budget every year since then.
From 2014 through 2016, city council spent $7 million on road work by diverting the $2 million Prince George receives from the Community Works Fund, a pot of money that goes to municipalities from the revenues collected by the federal government's excise tax on fuel.
Now that the proceeds from the Community Works Fund have been going into sidewalks and parks, spending on roads has not only declined, it's falling further and further behind with each passing year.
The newly-elected city council could decide to put the Community Works Fund proceeds back into roads or it could take that money and spend it somewhere else, leaving road rehabilitation work stuck at $5 million yet again. But even if that money were to go back into roads, it still would be less than what was spent from 2014 to 2016, thanks to inflation.
City staff recommend an automatic two per cent annual increase in the roads levy to deal with this problem but that comes with the obvious tax implications for local residents.
While Stolz isn't telling the whole story when he complains about a $2 million cut to road rehabilitation spending, he is identifying a pressing problem that can't continue to be ignored.
Some residents go months or even years without using city infrastructure like the public library, swimming pools, arenas, parks and even sidewalks. But, along with water and sewer, roads are the one piece of city infrastructure most residents use daily.
Diverting the money from automobile fuel tax away from roads doesn't make much sense, in either the short or long term.
Neither does freezing the road rehabilitation tax levy for five consecutive budget years.
Sounding the alarm about roads at election time can be a cynical election ploy but it's also a legitimate concern that needs addressing by all the candidates.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
