North Dundas Township is facing a water challenge not unlike the municipal infrastructure issues that many rural communities in Ontario face. The community needs an improved water supply, ideally from the St. Lawrence River, for current water users and to support growth. North Dundas is growing, and the growing demand for water outstrips the current supply. The situation did not need to get so dire.
Since amalgamation, many rural councils – including North Dundas – were timid in their planning for the future and in increasing taxation. For many years, councils saw keeping a zero or extremely low year-over-year tax increase as the end-all, and be-all of good governance. Annual tax assessment increases and new assessments were used to fund any inflationary growth in municipal budgets. All was well in the rural municipal world, until MPAC assessment values were frozen in 2016—those values remain frozen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, municipal tax increases continued to be kept low to help taxpayers during the unprecedented upheaval of the economy. Inflation kicked in as we eased out of pandemic restrictions and supports, which has caused municipal tax increases to sharply rise. But there is more to this.
In North Dundas’s case, growth also arrived – rapid growth for residential development as people sought to move away from large urban centres. Business and industrial growth demands, including from the community’s largest employer, Lactalis, has left the township is an unenviable position with its water supply. That comes down to a lack of long-term planning.
North Dundas only entered into an agreement to formally explore a north-south water link with South Dundas this year, despite many decades of talk and an acknowledgment that this link would finally tie the community to a nearly unending supply of water. Efforts to add more wells and increase supply within North Dundas have been ongoing, but that just keeps what they have going – a stopgap. Funding from the province through partnership and infrastructure programs, that could have funded the needed studies and engineering plans to get closer to that north-south link were used for other needed projects, or to keep tax increases low. If those were the priorities chosen by councils past and present, then should all the growth that has happened have been allowed? Hindsight is always 20/20.
The solution needed to allow North Dundas to keep growing at a fast pace, support the growth that has already occurred, and keep the faucets running is straightforward. Leadership at North Dundas must work to keep the current water supply going, and also fund the needed preparatory work to link to the St. Lawrence River. It is not going to be cheap—the time for that is long past. But it is necessary, and overdue.
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