Gillingham’s road-repair promise comes with a hitch

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/09/2022 (840 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pipes, pavement and police — the three Ps of municipal government — were never a priority for Glen Murray when he was the mayor of Winnipeg from 1998 and 2004.

That doesn’t appear to have changed much for the former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister, who is considered the front-runner in Winnipeg’s mayoral race. It may explain why his main challenger, Coun. Scott Gillingham, has chosen road repair as the main plank in his campaign platform. It’s a wedge issue he believes could help him overtake his chief rival.

“We need safer bike routes and more buses, but most Winnipeggers are drivers and our roads connect us to our jobs, to school, to our friends, and to recreation,” Gillingham, the city councillor for St. James, says in his latest promo video.

The strategy is designed not only to target car-oriented voters (of which there are many, especially in suburban Winnipeg), but also to give them an alternative to Murray’s vague platitudes about creating an eco-friendly community with health centres and community-based crime-prevention programs.

Gillingham says he would invest more in transit and active transportation, but his priority is with drivers.

“I support more cycling and better transit, and we must be ready to shift to electric vehicles, but most trips will be in cars or trucks for many years to come,” Gillingham said in a news release this week.

“Even if we could double the people walking, biking or riding buses, a majority of Winnipeg trips would still be made in a car — and that doesn’t even factor for freight.”

There is political wisdom behind Gillingham’s strategy. According to the City of Winnipeg’s 2022 citizen survey, roads and infrastructure are far and away the biggest priority for Winnipeggers right now. When asked what actions the city could take to improve the quality of life in the city, roads and infrastructure was the top pick for 58 per cent of respondents. Housing and social programs was second at 23 per cent. Active living/transit was fourth at 17 per cent.

Like all citizen surveys, the poll (conducted between May 2 and May 19), reflects top-of-mind issues at the time. When Winnipeggers were surveyed in May, it was during the height of one of the worst pothole seasons Winnipeg has had in years, owing in large part to a particularly nasty winter. Still, fixing the city’s battered roads would likely draw support at any time of year.

It seemed to work for Mayor Brian Bowman, who made road repair one of his key campaign platforms during his two terms in office. Spending on street renewal jumped 42 per cent to $164.7 million this year from $116 million in 2018.

It will likely take a lot more than that to bring Winnipeg’s roads into decent repair, after years of cuts and freezes to the street renewal budget in the 1990s and early 2000s. There were successive years in the 1990s where there was no funding at all for local roads. Winnipeg continues to feel the effect of that today.

Gillingham promises to spend an extra $50 million on roads over the next four years.

The challenge is how to pay for it. Without significant funding increases from senior levels of government, the city has few options but to borrow more to pay for increased road repair (unless it increases taxes or can find savings elsewhere). Over the past several years, city hall has funded more of its street renewal budget through debt-financing than it has in the past. Between 2000 and 2017, the city’s so-called cash to capital (the use of cash to pay for roads and other infrastructure) ranged from $50 million to $80 million a year. That fell to about $20 million in 2018 and $5 million last year. It was backfilled with debt.

The city’s debt per capita increased to $1,791 from $1,398 during that time. The maximum self-imposed debt ceiling is $2,800 per capita. It doesn’t leave much room to increase borrowing.

Gillingham has yet to say how he would pay for higher road repair costs. His campaign officials say those details will be released soon, but that it would not include additional debt.

Fixing city roads will be expensive either way. It will be up to Winnipeg voters to decide if that’s where they want their tax dollars to go.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca