Waddell: What do we do now?

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By: Ken Waddell

myWestman.ca

Having  attended nearly every council meeting since 1989 and having chaired six and half years of those meetings as mayor, I have pondered many times as to what are the biggest challenges for Neepawa.

I have come to the conclusion that there are two major ones: Neepawa has a bad reputation and we have made major infrastructure errors over the past 20 years. . .

A bad reputation
One of the biggest challenges is the strange capacity for councillors, of every era, to wrap themselves up in the smallest of details and often with very counter-productive and negative effects. This is especially true with two area of concerns: the management of human resources and the handling of resident’s complaints.

A huge amount of time and effort gets used up on these two issues and often with little or no positive changes.

This has resulted in a major challenge. Neepawa has gained a reputation across the province as a town that can’t keep good help. An example: Neepawa has, since 1998, had 12 people, men and women fill the chair of CAO (Chief Administration Officer) or acting CAO. Twelve people in 16 years! That’s an average of 1.33 years per person and that’s disgraceful. Some have left because they wanted more money.

Every time that has happened, councils have sought out a new individual and paid the new person more money than the last one was asking. We have lost a number of good staff at all levels over the years as well. Thankfully, all staff positions are now filled in the Town of Neepawa for the first time in many years. The staff is very good, not perfect but very good, and council should step back and let them do their job.

And the next time a ratepayer or a staff person comes forward and complains about anyone in the staff, maybe, just maybe, they should be told politely to get a life and get over it. Not every conversation is going to be a happy one and not every response is going to be of the highest quality.

With the challenges this town faces and with how good we have it here compared to war-torn countries or even other parts of Manitoba or Canada, sometimes people who complain about staff rather than deal with the many real issues just need to get over themselves and grow up.

Infrastructure errors
Probably the largest challenge we face is that Neepawa is very, very far behind in infrastructure renewal and one has to ask why?

Here lie some of the reasons.

1. Taking an arbitrary year as an example: if Neepawa had borrowed $2 million in 1994 to invest in water and sewer lines and roads and if we had taken out a 10-year debenture to pay for it, we would have had $2 million in improvements paid for by 2004 – and at 1994 prices.

Similarly, if we had done it again in 2004, we would now have had another $2 million in improvements – and at 2004 prices. We would be poised to do it again in 2014 and our total would have been $6 million in improvements.

2. Just a few years ago, the Town of Neepawa embarked on a very worthy and expensive project to bring in two new wells, a raw water line and an upgrade to the water treatment plant. It cost $7 million with half being put up by the province and half by the Town of Neepawa with a small contribution from the RM of Langford. The problem is that the Town chose to put their share, $3.5 million, as a debenture on the taxes and that was simply wrong for several reasons.

A) The Public Utilities Board had said at least 12 years earlier that utility improvements –  repairs or capital – should be funded out of the water income and not put onto taxes.

B) Having the debenture on the taxes means that everybody pays for the debenture whether or not they have access to sewer and water service. Many properties will never likely see sewer and water services but they are stuck with paying the debenture. That’s simply unfair.

C) Having the debenture on the taxes means that higher water users don’t pay their share. The higher water users use a higher percentage of the total water than their percentage of the of the town taxes.

D) Home owners are paying more and more of the water debenture each year as their assessment goes up – meanwhile they are only using low amounts of water.

The obvious conclusion is that the council and the province made an error that misplaced water capital costs onto taxes and has badly restricted our ability to replace infrastructure. The annual debenture payment on the raw water line is $268,301. If the debenture had been on the utility – that is on the water bill where it belongs – the 15-20 major water consumers would be paying half of it or about $134,000. The rest of the 1,400 water users would be paying half of it or $96 per user.

That’s $24 per quarter. I bet that the extra debenture charge comes to more than that. The truth is that taxpayers, even those who have no town water service, are subsidizing the water users, both large and small.

The point is that if the $3.5 million spent on water had been put on the water bills where it should have been and not off-loaded onto the tax bills, then that $3.5 million of tax revenue could have been spent on other infrastructure. So we have that $3.5 million plus the $2 million that was unused in 1994, the $2 million unused from 2004 and the $2 million unused from 2014 and it totals up to $9.5 million. If even half of that had been cost shared with the province, Neepawa would have had $14.25 million more in infrastructure improvements.

No wonder we are behind.

The question is what to do now?

There may be many answers, but here are three possibilities. If Neepawa and area is going to survive, it has to grow and in my view, these three things need to happen:

One is for council to stop the long term habit of picking at staff and direct their attention to properly financed projects.

The second is that at the current low interest rates, the town should make improvements as quickly as possible as construction cost increases are going to far outstrip the interest costs at today’s rates.

The third is for the Town of Neepawa to possibly sell off the multi-million dollar water facility including the wells, the raw water lines, the water treatment plant and tower to a regional water co-op and have it managed by a group that can seek financing and add more customers. There are many more potential  customers, especially rural customers.

We need to spin off this valuable asset and get some of the money back into Neepawa’s capital budget. Rosedale and Langford residents understandably want good water but there’s no way Neepawa can or should finance it.

Neepawa can’t afford to finance it. It’s a regional or area concern.