Increase funding or expect infrastructure failure, municipalities tell province

A wooden truss bridge can be seen in in East Coulee, Alta. in tis undated file photo. (File)

The roads, bridges, water pipes and sewers lines that connect rural Alberta are essential to residents, industry, and the province’s economy.

Without a major injection of funding, this critical infrastructure will soon enter a period of accelerating deterioration and more frequent and severe failures, a report says.

The Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA), with Tantus Solutions Group, surveyed the condition of the various assets managed by its members.

The cost to bring every highway, bridge, and utility up to optimal condition would require an investment of $17 billion more than the municipalities currently receive through provincial or federal programs.

"This is a large-scale issue with very real risks to rural communities and the provincial economy, and solving it is going to take more than a few million dollars in additional grant funding," RMA Director Amber Link told members at the RMA convention in Edmonton on Wednesday.

There are many steps municipalities can take to better manage infrastructure assets, but there is only one way to get rural communities out of the infrastructure deficit, she said.

"A new temporary funding stream is the only possible tool to address this initial $17 billion deficit," Link said.

The two main sources of funding available to municipalities, the Canada Community Building Fund and Alberta’s Local Government Fiscal Framework, use per-capita formulas that rural communities say don’t account for the infrastructure liabilities they manage.

Grant Gabert, a senior consultant with Tantus, said the "astronomical" deficit numbers might look scary, but there is a strong economic case for making the needed investments as soon as possible.

The methodology used in the report to calculate the condition, lifespan, and maintenance costs is complex, but the principle behind it is simple: Infrastructure in good condition is easier to keep in good condition, and the more it deteriorates, the faster it fails.

Bringing the surveyed infrastructure up to prime condition now would see municipalities spending $5 billion less each year in maintenance and repair costs.

"The return on investment here really can occur quite quickly. That is a huge amount of maintenance money that is required simply to hold us where we’re at. There is potential payoff in a little over three years," Gabert said.

If those investments aren’t made, "things get a little scarier when we start looking out into the future," he said.

With no intervention, the report projects that by 2028 critical infrastructure in rural Alberta will have an average condition rating of about 20 per cent, and 90 per cent of its useful life will have been consumed.

As it degrades, the cost of repair increases exponentially, as do associated risks.

The report forecasts that infrastructure failures are likely to increase "in both frequency and severity" in the years ahead.

"An infrastructure portfolio already showing signs of underinvestment is particularly vulnerable to risks and has likely already begun deteriorating quickly. Without adequate intervention this deterioration will impact not only resident quality of life, but also economic potential," the report states.

Link said the scale and complexity of the problem has often been challenging to articulate because of a consistent lack of data among RMA members, which has also hindered the organization's advocacy efforts.

"Historically, this lack of data has been used by government or other stakeholders to push back on our call for more focus on rural infrastructure needs, especially based on the use of per capita metrics," Link said.

"If we want to propose realistic, and credible solutions to closing this gap, there is tremendous value to being able to speak to the scale and intensity of the liability, which is what this project allows."