Decades of roadwork misery on horizon, city report shows
Montrealers might be thinking the roadwork torture they’re being subjected to will surely come to an end at some point. One day several years from now — poof — the number of construction zones and detours will diminish and most of the city’s streets will be as good as new, right? Wrong. A report produced by Montreal’s civil service in 2016 that has never been presented to the public reveals that even if the city immediately nearly tripled its total annual investment in major repairs and reconstruction of its road, water and sewer networks, the sustained massive spending increase would end Montreal’s roadwork maintenance “deficit” only around 2040. And that was the optimistic scenario presented in the 103-page document, which the Montreal Gazette obtained through an access-to-information request. The other, apocalyptic scenario predicted the city would pretty much never catch up on necessary work on roads and most other infrastructure if it continued to invest annually at the same level as it had for years up to that point. The purpose of the report, which was dated June 2016, was to give decision-makers a five-year intervention plan.
It was for each type of underground and above-ground infrastructure from 2016 to 2020. However, several graphs and tables in the report model the evolving state of each type of infrastructure well into the next century. Specifically, the report predicted that under what it called the “optimal” investment scenario of tripling infrastructure spending and indexing that amount for inflation each year thereafter, Montreal would get caught up on bringing the city’s arteries back to acceptable standards in 2037, and in 2047 for local borough streets. That’s as much as two decades later than former mayor Denis Coderre said it would take to end Montreal’s infrastructure maintenance “deficit” in 2026. Meanwhile, under the apocalyptic scenario in the report, which was based on the city continuing to spend $185 million a year on all of its underground and aboveground infrastructure combined, the condition of most of the types of infrastructure would continue to deteriorate for decades because the city would continue falling behind on what had already accumulated into a $4-billion “backlog ” of necessary work as of 2016. “The current annual budget allotted by the city of Montreal of $185 million per year is insufficient to maintain a ‘functional standard’ level of service, meaning ‘good’, in the short and long term,” the document says. It did not assess the quality of the work that had been carried out. Meanwhile, the “optimal” investment scenario called for the city to immediately increase its combined annual spending on the road, water and sewer networks to $524 million in 2016, and index the amount for inflation each year thereafter. However, with the amount of construction work already creating disruptions and raising the public’s ire, the report warned, city officials would have to consider the social and economic impact of further increasing the number of work sites. In October 2016, a few months after the report is dated, Coderre, who was mayor from 2013 to 2017, announced an ambitious plan to “double” roadwork over a 10-year period, calling for $6.9 billion to be spent on 5,000 kilometres of roads, sewers and water mains by 2026. “When we don’t have a choice, we don’t have a choice,” Coderre told the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal in a speech that month to announce the plan, adding that “it’s not with a light heart” that he was going to double construction work for a decade. Montreal had a $4-billion accumulated “deficit” in infrastructure maintenance due to under-investment by previous administrations for 30 years, Coderre said, touting the same figure in the 2016-2020 report. The 2016-2020 report backs up Coderre’s position on what was to blame for the accumulated infrastructure “deficit.” However, the figures in the report suggest Coderre’s target of “doubling ” construction work and its 10-year timeline fell well short of what was needed. The 2016-2020 intervention plan pegged Montreal’s short-term infrastructure investment needs at $5.1 billion, of which $4 billion was the accumulated “deficit.” The other $1 billion needed between 2016 and 2020 was for regular maintenance to keep what wasn’t already broken from breaking. And the report wasn’t requiring just any type of roadwork, either. The simulations show that nearly all of the roadwork to be done on arterial roads until about 2040 and on local roads into the 2050s was major — meaning reconstruction and major rehabilitation. After that, most of work that would be required would be minor rehabilitation, along with some road reconstruction that would be “synchronized” with underground infrastructure repair along the same stretch. Arterial roads are the responsibility of the city. Local roads are the responsibility of the boroughs. Coderre’s successor, Mayor Valérie Plante, unveiled a 20182020 capital works program this year that dedicated $332.5 million to road protection in 2018. However, only $159 million of it was destined for a program that the opposition says pays for major rehabilitation and reconstruction on the arterial and local networks. The rest of the money, the opposition says, was earmarked for two minor rehabilitation programs that the Coderre administration created and that Plante’s Projet Montréal party slammed as “cosmetic” pothole-patching while it was in the opposition. The paving work in the two programs is meant to extend the life of a road by five years or seven to 12 years while it awaits needed reconstruction. By contrast, the “optimal” investment scenario in the 20162020 intervention plan called for the city to begin spending $219.4 million a year on major road repair and reconstruction — including $140.9 million for arteries and $78.5 million for local roads. With inflation, it would have meant spending $227.75 million in 2018. The Plante administration is expected to present Montreal’s 2019 annual operating budget and 2019-2021 capital works program on Thursday. And while the five-year intervention plan obtained by the Montreal Gazette was never presented to the public, it also passed imperceptibly at an agglomeration council meeting in November 2016 where it was tabled without discussion. The resolution called for the agglomeration council’s approval to submit the report to the Quebec Municipal Affairs Department, which had recently begun requiring municipalities to submit a fiveyear intervention plan to secure provincial subsidies for infrastructure work. The civil service report that accompanied the resolution didn’t mention any of the key findings, notably the “optimal” scenario and the doomsday scenario. Montreal West Mayor Beny Masella, president of the Association of Suburban Municipalities, said he found the report on the agenda of the November 2016 agglomeration council meeting this week after hunting for it when the Montreal Gazette asked if he had ever heard of it. The report had a precursor — a five-year intervention plan for 2011 to 2015 that was produced only in 2013 — which the Montreal Gazette also obtained through access-to-information. Neither intervention plan was ever on the agenda of any standing committee of the agglomeration council, where civil servants make presentations to elected officials and answer questions on subjects such as Montreal’s infrastructure. “My problem is as a former elected official, why the hell didn’t I know about this?” former Westmount mayor Peter Trent, who retired from politics last year, said when the Montreal Gazette showed him the reports. He called them watershed documents because they’re the first comprehensive plans looking at all of the city’s underground and above-ground infrastructure together. In fact, current opposition leader Lionel Perez, who was responsible for infrastructure on the executive committee under Coderre, said on Tuesday he didn’t think he had seen the 2016-2020 report before. He had seen the previous intervention plan and had seen some of the figures in the newer plan, he said. “It’s an internal, administrative document that is used by the services (city departments) to plan,” said Perez, now interim leader of Ensemble Montréal, Coderre’s former party. And whatever numbers were presented publicly by the Coderre administration at the time, he said, “were based on whatever the services (departments) provided.” Trent was vice-chairman of the agglomeration council’s finance and administration committee from 2010 until he resigned in late September 2016, claiming it had become “window dressing.” The panel spent hours discussing the Montreal budget and capital works spending, but its recommendations were ignored, he said. Trent said the two five-year intervention plans should have been submitted to at least his committee because of their impact on capital spending. When Westmount created its own local 20-year capital spending plan in 2016, he said, it was based on 400 pages of projections and diagnostics that civil servants presented to elected officials. “Working on the yearly budget for the city of Montreal should not be a hide-and-seek process,” Trent said. “And that’s what it’s become because we should have seen this stuff — clearly. It had enormous implications for the budget process, so why wasn’t it (presented)?”
The yearly budget for the city of Montreal should not be a hide-and-seek process. And that’s what it’s become because we should have seen this stuff.