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Resident takes council to task for infrastructure failures

July 11, 2024   ·   1 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

At least one Orangeville resident gives town council a failing grade when it comes to the management of municipal facilities.

Fead Street resident Noel Ramsey moved to town in 2015, lured by a beautiful Cape Cod-styled home close to the farmers’ market and other amenities.

One of the reasons he moved to Fead Street, he said, was the excellent surroundings and facilities available to residents.

“It was really an asset to have the recreation centre just at the end of the street within walking distance,” Ramsey said, referring to the Tony Rose Memorial Sports Centre.

He said it’s concerning when he hears that the arena may be closed because of equipment failure, especially given the town’s recent track record with infrastructure projects.

He said C Line is being dug up for a second time to replace a culvert so as not to hinder fish spawning.

“So they had to seal up the road and then come back again to dig it up,” he said.

Then there was the “four-year fiasco” at the Alder Street arena pool. That repair job was plagued by cost overruns and multiple delays.

“I don’t know who was doing the management of that,” he said. “There’s always explanations and reasons for it, but the management of the whole thing is questionable.”

It seemed that it took the town more than a year to install an elevator and renovate the Mill Street branch of the town’s library, he said.

Now the town is restricting residents’ use of water on lawns and gardens. Council adopted new restrictions in its summer Lawn Watering Bylaw toward the conservation of the municipal water supply. But consumption isn’t restricted.

Existing wells that provide potable water have been in service for about 34 years and several wells have experienced declines in efficiency and supply capacity. And it’s estimated that 10 per cent of treated potable water is lost to leakage in the system.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a memo saying that we’re restricted on how many times we’re allowed to flush the toilet,” he said.

One of the items on the July 7 meeting agenda was the equipment failure at the Tony Rose facility referenced by Ramsey. The pool’s dehumidification unit at the pool has stopped working.

A report from the town’s Department of Community Services said that, despite numerous attempts to fix the unit over the past year, the equipment is unrepairable. With the onset of increased warm air and high humidity, mold has started to grow on the acoustic panels and is noticeable on equipment.

“We’ve got this valuable asset at the end of the street and we’ve got other assets in town that aren’t being maintained,” Ramsey said. “From my perspective as a citizen that’s paying taxes, they’re not being managed properly and they’re being allowed to deteriorate.”

He said he likes Orangeville’s councillors as individuals. They work for the citizens and, professionally, he said there’s something lacking in how infrastructure is managed.

“I don’t give you a very good grade when it comes to the management oversight of the town facilities and the staff,” he said. “What we see are facilities that are being allowed to deteriorate and they’re considering closing a facility because a mechanical piece of equipment is deteriorating or something wasn’t installed properly or they didn’t work with another department.”

If municipal properties were being adequately managed and monitored, such breakdowns shouldn’t occur, he said.

“None of us are engineers or water experts or wastewater experts,” Mayor Lisa Post said of council. “We do have very capable staff who are taking care all of those areas. So often we will defer your technical questions to some of them.”

Post said council is “collectively right now dealing with decades and decades and decades of underspending in infrastructure and in our assets.”

She said council isn’t considering shuttering Tony Rose. Rather, just the pool may be temporarily shut down until the situation can be reassessed.

“We don’t want to end up in an Alder Street (Arena) situation, which was a $600,000 project that turned into three years and $10-million because of what we found underneath when we took out the pool liner.”

“We hold you accountable for what’s going on,” Ramsey said. “When you say that you’re investing now, this is not the first day on the job.”

“We’re advocating for better funding structures from the province and the feds so that we can fix a lot of these problems,” Post said. “We can’t just increase everybody’s property taxes by 50 per cent to pay for the infrastructure deficits. We need to do it in a planned and well thought out way in order for us to address this historical long list of infrastructure deficits.”

“If you are doing these investments, if we should be considering it, then you’re doing a very poor job of communication because the impression that we’re getting as citizens is that it’s not being managed,” Ramsey said.

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