Deferred repair costs prove expensive

It’s official. The Royal University Hospital is a mess.

For those of you who missed it, RUH needs around $430 million in repairs to bring it back to health. It’s part of about $2.2 billion in backlogged repairs that health facilities in our province need. Our hospitals are on life support.

If you have been inside Royal University, the report about our flagship hospital should come as no surprise. The hospital in which we took so much pride at one time now looks dirty and neglected. Its mall is dated and dreary, and the emergency department often looks dirty and disgusting. The hospital screams of underfunding.

It has been that way for a long time.

The cutbacks of the Grant Devine era that hit hospitals hard were taken to a whole other level during the austerity of the Roy Romanow years. By the time the provincial economy had started to turn around during Lorne Calvert’s term in office, there was years of repair to catch up on.

What shocked many of us when we heard the latest repair estimate was that we assumed the backlog was being caught up under the Wall regime. Instead we realized that the football stadium for Regina is a higher priority for the Saskatchewan Party government than our hospitals.

The government’s weak excuse is that RUH is old. However, there are hospitals across the country that are as old or older, but are still well maintained. The problem is that Saskatchewan started to defer maintenance in the 1980s and has reached the point where we can’t defer it anymore.

Contractors who have worked at the hospital describe not only the work that has been neglected but also the poor quality of the repairs that have been done. Unlabelled wiring, incomplete or not updated blueprints and drawings — problems that should never been allowed to happen are everywhere.

It’s not that much different from what all levels of governments do. They decide to save money in the short term. The City of Saskatoon decided to “save” money on roads and bridge repair. Saskatchewan decided to “save” money on highways. School boards “saved” on school repair.

The problem is that those aren’t savings at all. Those costs rear up eventually, growing worse for being delayed. Potholes or old ventilation systems don’t care about your budget, they need to be repaired. If they aren’t, the costs go up. It’s the same principle as your vehicle. You can spend a little money to repair the brakes when they squeal, or spend a lot when they start to grind. In Saskatchewan we tend to wait until they fall off and the car has run through a wall.

These costs should not be a surprise to anyone. There is an entire industry dedicated to public and private building maintenance. It provides databases with the recommended maintenance schedules for thousands of schools, hospitals, private and public buildings. Those databases tell you exactly how long identical parts will last across the continent, when to replace them, and what happens if they are not replaced.

Ignorance is not an excuse. So, why the problems?

One explanation is that, as a province, we aren’t as wealthy as we think. Things are definitely better than they were, and a $14 billion provincial budget is a lot more than when we were living on $6 billion. It seems easy to fix the problems in the province with that kind of revenue, but every part of the province wants its share.

Cities want more funding, unions want a part of the growth, businesses want lower taxes, and there are hundreds of kilometres of highways that are so broken that patching or even repaving isn’t enough.

At the same time, Saskatchewan made some short-term moves that are hurting it. Calvert’s pledge to keep Saskatchewan utility bills low made it harder for our Crown corporations to replace needed infrastructure. Years ago, SaskPower marked all the power poles that needed to be replaced. Today, those markings have worn off but the poles remain.

So the end result is a government that is awash in cash, has a bigger stack of repair bills, and even larger public expectations. It’s those expectations that are the problem. This may be a new Saskatchewan, but we have a lot of leftover bills from the old one.

The lesson to Premier Brad Wall’s government is that while it is a lot of fun to build new stuff, there are some big obligations to some of the old infrastructure upon which we all rely. This government may not have created the problem, but it’s the one that needs to fix it to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.