By Roy Wood, Special to the Times Chronicle
As the controversially large tax and services hike for Osoyoos taxpayers edges its way toward reconsideration, two visions of how the town should deal with its aging water and sewer infrastructure have emerged.
In separate interviews with the Times Chronicle, current Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Rod Risling and former CAO Barry Romanko offered different views on the speed with which the problem needs to be addressed and the speed with which user fees need to increase.
On October 24, following seven weeks of consultation and meetings, town council passed the 2024 budget as part of a five-year plan. The budget included a property tax hike and dramatic jumps in municipal services, particularly water and sewer, bringing the total increase for residents of about 39 per cent over 2023.
For an average Osoyoos home, total taxes and user fees will jump from $3,852 to $5,366 effective January 1.
The most contentious aspects of the hikes have been water and sewer utility charges, which each more than doubled. Water jumped from $320 to $1,133 per connection. Sewer went from $380 to $764.
Public reaction has been loud and angry, leading to a public meeting last week at which several hundred taxpayers gathered to demand a change in direction.
The budget that council passed was based on the recommendations of Risling and other senior staff. The aspect of the budget that has become most controversial is the unprecedented jump in annual charges for water and sewer services.
“What was presented [to council] was a plan to address the infrastructure deficit,” Risling, who became CAO in August 2022, said in a recent telephone interview. “In a nutshell, this is a plan based on the best information that we have had ever . . . [it provides] a very clear picture of where we’re at what we need to do.”
The dramatic water and sewer infrastructure remediation aspects of the October budget are rooted in consultant reports from TRU Engineering, which were presented to council in June.
The reports, one for water and one for sewer, included “asset management plans,” which detail the inventories of the town’s sewer and water assets – pipes and pumps and reservoirs and the like.
The asset management plans made it clear, said Risling, that large portions of the water and sewer infrastructure are already past their “expected age life.” Over the next 20 years, the plan calls for fixing or replacing assets that are already outdated, not those that will expire in the interim.
The TRU reports also provided a financial plan for how the town could combine taxation and borrowing over the next 20 years to pay for the restoration or replacement of the aging infrastructure.
Risling said the more than doubling of water and sewer hikes is intended to be a one-time thing. And while the rates won’t be going back down, future increases are intended to be based on inflation and other incremental cost increases.
In an interview, Romanko questioned the need for the sudden increases, which he says will have serious consequences for some taxpayers.
“There are people who cannot afford this,” he said. “Mortgage rates are going up. These rates are going up. Rental rates are going to go up. People are going to say, ‘Well I just can’t afford to live here anymore.’
He takes issue with several aspects of the capital plan outlined in the budget, including spending $4.5 million to bring 92nd Ave. down from the Elks Hall to “higher municipal standards” when he says the current road is “very practical”.
And he also points to the Harbour Key Drive improvement for $1.5 million. “It’s not an arterial road . . . Usually, you’d put in a parcel tax for the people who benefit and the community might help out a little,” he says.
In the five-year capital plan, he said, is a provision to start charging taxpayers for the cost of borrowing money even though it hasn’t been borrowed yet. “[These are] projects that haven’t been started. Basically, they’re taking money ahead of time and my question is, ‘Why are you doing that?’”
He added: “Every municipality has aging infrastructure. [What is important] is how you deal with it in the context of affordability within the community.”
“If it was a crisis, that’s one thing. [But] this is a staged development that can be spread out. Maybe it can be spread over 10 years,” he said.
Romanko, who was CAO from 2008 through August 2019, said that when assessing any plan, “You’ve gotta look at the projects in the plan and say what is the real value added, and what is the sense of urgency. What is really important?”
As for the notion that asset management plans are essential to managing the town’s finances, Romanko said, “Yes, it’s nice to have [one] knowing where everything is at. But realistically, we know we need a new town hall. We don’t need an asset management plan for that . . . we know that we need a water treatment plant. We don’t need [one] for that.”
A planning document is just that, he said. “It’s not a bible. It’s not law. It’s a plan. You take the plan and you work the plan just like you would a household budget.”
Romanko said his administration started working on the concept of asset management with TRU Engineering as early as 2016. In subsequent years, he said, asset management plans became “a buzzword.”
Risling argues that besides being a vital management tool, asset management plans are an “extremely important” part of applying for grants from senior levels of government.
At both the provincial and federal levels, he said, qualifying for grants will be much more difficult if a municipality does not have asset management plans in place.
Having asset management plans is not technically mandatory, he said, “but in essence, it almost is,” he said.
And without many of these grants, “We just couldn’t function.”A prime example is the $9 million provincial infrastructure grant the town received in June toward the $15 million water treatment plant.
At the Union of BC Municipalities convention last September, “We told [the province] that we were doing an asset management plan and have initiated a water conservation plan.” Without those two things, he said, the town would almost certainly have not received the grant.
As well, the Canada Community Building Fund, which provides Osoyoos with $294,000 each year from Ottawa, now has a requirement that applying municipalities have appropriate asset management plans.
However cogent the plans, Osoyoos taxpayers are clearly not convinced that the almost 40 per cent jump in their tax bills is acceptable.
“We have an upset community,” said Romanko. “What’s happened is that trust has been broken. And council has to rebuild that trust.
“What they have to do is re-start the budget process with representatives of the community sitting down with council and re-establish that trust.”
There is still plenty of time, Romanko points out. The only hard deadline is that the final budget must be submitted to the provincial municipal affairs department sometime in May.
Momentum is already building toward a reconsideration.
In a story in this newspaper last week, Mayor Sue McKortoff and Councillors Jim King and Myers Bennett indicated a willingness to re-open the budget. At last Wednesday’s taxpayer meeting, Councillor Johnny Cheung expressed a similar view.
Several ideas have been floated about how the public consultation part of a re-examination might work, including a large public forum at the Sonora Centre and the creation of taxpayer committees to look at various aspects of the budget.
“It happens in other communities,” said Romanko. “They have a community budget committee or something like that. That would be a way that . . . would help to rebuild the trust.
