Global’s Brayden Jagger Haines was in Hudson this morning to report on the state of our roads and citizen pressure to fix them. I met him at the corner of Como Gardens and Shepherd, one of many stretches of Hudson’s nearly 80 kilometres of roads with chronic pothole problems.
I showed him the patchwork of pothole repairs at that corner. It tells a story repeated all over town. The road was built with inadequate drainage and never upgraded. Cracks went unsealed, allowing the freeze-thaw cycle to pry asphalt apart down to gravel. Crumbling shoulders were never built up. Subsequent repairs never went deep enough to last.
Our residents should be aware that Hudson has never adopted a formal plan to invest annually in road maintenance and upgrades. It wasn’t until I began covering municipal politics that I learned that cities and towns try to anticipate problems before they occur with constantly updated preventive maintenance programs. Nor do we invest in essentials, such as safe walking and cycling shoulders alongside our major arteries so that citizens have a secure alternative to risking their lives. Our sidewalks are a public disgrace. Our storm sewers are approaching the end of their useful life cycle. Our potable water and wastewater collection and treatment systems failed to receive the regular maintenance and hardware/software upgrades essential for their dependable operation. In short, one can’t correct decades of neglect in four years. And where to begin?
I explained to the Global reporter that Quebec requires municipalities to draft a plan to prioritize what needs fixing first. An intervention plan rates infrastructure according to the work required to bring it to a townwide standard. The plan’s metrics rank roads as A, B.C or D, A being the best. Hudson has no A roads and a few B’s. The rest are C or D.
Until this council took office, the town didn’t have an infrastructure plan to address this infrastructure deficit. Our previous DG and council had started the ball rolling, but they still went ahead and paved streets before the intervention plan was in place. We got it done, thanks to the efforts of our new DG and infrastructure department director, but those years of dereliction cost us credibility with MAMH and MELCC, Quebec’s municipal affairs and environment ministries. Trust, once lost, requires scrupulous attention to reporting requirements in order to be restored.
I sympathize with residents angry about the state of Hudson’s roads. I ran for council because I wanted to fix this mess once and for all, not just by applying a coat of asphalt, but by going as deep as necessary to repair and upgrade storm sewers, water connections and anything else down there that needed work to bring it up to acceptable standards. Only then should it be repaved.
Estimated cost of bringing Hudson’s Cs and Ds up to an acceptable standard is somewhere between $20 and $40 million. The same federal/provincial fuel excise tax rebate program which covered part of the cost of the 2007-2010 drinking water network upgrades and the sewer treatment system may cover part, but not all. Taxpayers can count on $1.6 million every four years. The rest has to come from loan bylaws.
In a perfect world, we would not be forced to borrow to pay for paving. I see borrowing to pay for paving as akin to buying groceries on credit; sooner or later, one runs out of food and must tap the line of credit yet again. Hudson takes in approximately $12 million in tax revenues every year but with more than 80% of that already spent on downloads, salaries and services, there isn’t that much disposable income, which is why previous administrations incurred $36 million in long-term debt.
Thanks to strict fiscal discipline, an extremely competent administration and yes, COVID-19, Hudson is in good shape fiscally. (Details will be released following our meeting with the auditors prior to next week’s live-to-air September council meeting, which will include an interactive question period via Zoom Webinar.) We have the funds to leverage a certain amount of infrastructure renewal every year. It is sustainable as long as revenues maintain their current level, but as we all know, that can change in a heartbeat.
At our August meeting, Council approved a $100K expenditure to repave Main between Cote St. Charles and Oakland as well as a badly degraded section of Como Gardens and several other bad stretches of side streets. This went to tender and Council awarded the bid. As of this morning, our Public Works crews were replacing broken manholes prior to the contractor starting work. Some of them have been broken for years.
Originally, we had hoped to repave Main Road through the downtown core this year. The administration assured Council we had the funding to leverage a $1.32 million infrastructure upgrade and repaving contract. This fell through because Council wanted the commercial community and residents to be consulted on what they wanted the downtown core to look like. This led to the $100,000 Stantec contract and decisions regarding parking, sidewalks, cycling lanes, trees and streetscaping. I’m hopeful that council can agree on those factors in time to adopt a downtown-core repaving bylaw in time for the November 2021 municipal elections.
Instead of redoing Main through the core, Council then proposed to spend the $1.32 million on repaving Main between Quarry Point Road and the Vaudreuil-Dorion border, plus all of Bellevue. This option died when two reports from consulting engineers placed the total cost at well over $5 million.
In the end, Council approved a $2.2M loan bylaw to repave Bellevue. The contract went to tender, the low bid was accepted and work can begin as soon as we get final approval from MAMH, the municipal affairs ministry. I have been told we can expect it by the end of next week. The bylaw covers base remediation, culvert work, widening and repaving of Bellevue and a section of Main Road in Como. The loan bylaw doesn’t include an emergency bypass lane which will be opened to vehicle traffic in the event of another flood similar to those in 2017-19 which forced the closure of Main at Sanderson; this will be funded out of general revenues.
As I said, I don’t blame residents for bitching and moaning about Hudson’s roads. Our neighbourhood and all of District 5 has some of the crappiest roads in town. My constituents joke about this being the price for electing a shit-disturbing councillor, but as long as the process of ranking what needs doing most is impartial, I’m okay with that.
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