The following article appeared in the October 23 edition of the Guelph Tribune:
A proposed five-year capital budget that excludes a new library, a south end recreation centre, a Wilson Street parkade and a host of smaller projects drew both praise and worried comments from city council members.
Mayor Karen Farbridge said she’s been hearing complaints for about a decade that the city’s capital budget plans weren’t affordable. While the people saying this were right, she told council Monday, “it is this council that is starting to wrestle this to the ground.”
The big difference between past capital budget forecasts and the one now being proposed, she said, is that “what we see here we have an ability to finance . . . we can finance what’s in front of us.”
Farbridge credited city CAO Hans Loewig and city finance director Margaret Neubauer for the new five-year capital budget plan, which replaces a previous 10-year capital forecast. “Their determination has pushed this through and reset our course as a city,” said the mayor.
Coun. Ian Findlay said having funding identified for all of the projects remaining in the proposed capital budget is “a huge step forward for our community.”
Coun. Karl Wettstein agreed, but said he was concerned that the three big projects being delayed are all projects partly intended to stimulate the city’s economy and growth.
“While the world is stimulating, we are contracting,” Wettstein told council. “I am struggling with how we balance that.”
He also said council has “political commitments” to the people of Guelph about building a south end recreation centre and a new library, given how long both these projects have been on the city’s agenda.
The biggest building still in the five-year plan is a $26.5-million compost plant. The most recent cost estimate for a south end recreation centre is $42-51 million, and for the Wilson Street parkade it’s $15 million. The library’s price tag has been put at $55.5 million, including land acquisition and parking.
Coun. Mike Salisbury said he’s concerned about delaying the library indefinitely, in terms of uncertainty this will cause in the part of downtown where buildings are to be acquired for the library site on Wyndham Street North. He’s worried about “urban decay” problems, he said, “if we continue to move towards it (a new library) but don’t have any effective target in mind.”
Neubauer said the proposed capital budget contains only enough money to buy some of the properties on Wyndham that the city has been eyeing for the library. “At this point there isn’t a strategy in place to deal with the timing of a library,” she said.
Council decided in February to support a concept that would put a three-storey library on Wyndham Street north, backing onto the Baker Street Parking Lot. It was to be built as part of a multifaceted redevelopment of the Baker Street parking lot. This parking lot redevelopment has also been pushed out of the new fiveyear capital forecast.
Saying she was concerned about the role the library was supposed to play as a catalyst for more private sector investment in the downtown, Coun. Lise Burcher wondered when council will look at this “larger picture.”
Neubauer agreed a new library would be a catalyst, but said the problem is how much it would cost to build.
One of the big problems the city is facing is that development charges, a major source of money for capital projects, are way down. They are bringing in only 25 per cent of normal revenues, as building activity has been sagging in Guelph.
In fact, the city is facing a new situation this year in having to issue millions of dollars in debt to complete water and wastewater projects, because of the shortfall in revenue from development charges.
“We are having to front-load payment of this infrastructure and having to do it through debt,” Farbridge said. “I can only see that continuing to be a challenge” when it comes to building the infrastructure needed to meet the growth targets for Guelph set in the province’s Places to Grow legislation, she added.
The new five-year capital forecast assumes that growth in the city and development charges will return to 65 per cent of normal levels in 2010 and be back to normal by 2011. However, these predictions might need to be revised as time goes on, Neubauer noted.
She told council the previous 10-year capital forecast “really was not realistic” and couldn’t have been financed even if city revenues were at normal levels, rather than depressed due to the recession, as they currently are.
One of the city’s capital spending priorities is developing the Hanlon Creek Business Park. Neubauer said proceeds from land sales in the business park could open up room for other projects in the last couple of years of the fiveyear capital spending plan.
She later told reporters that it won’t be possible to get all three of the big delayed projects rolling towards the end of the fiveyear period, but it might be possible to get one of them ready to proceed. If this happens, community feedback could influence council’s decision about which one might be built at that point, she said.