The Town of Drayton Valley is looking to the future as the municipality works toward having the utilities in the community be self-sustaining services.
Elvera Thomson, the general manager of corporate services for the Town, says in the past, the surpluses from the Town’s utility operations could be anywhere from $2-3 million. Those surpluses didn’t necessarily go into a fund specifically for water and sewer, but there was lots of money being put into reserves in general.
However, there wasn’t a policy that dictated that a certain amount of funds from the water and sewer revenues had to be put in reserves.
“What ended up happening as the years went on and things got tough, we had a series of events that happened with Covid, cost of living, inflation, and more,” says Thomson. “To manage tax increases, we just put less and less into reserves.”
Now, with the looming bill of repairing and replacing integral infrastructure in the community, the Town is putting a policy in place that will ensure the surplus from the utility services will be put into a reserve fund specifically for infrastructure maintenance and replacement.
“We just got to a point where none [of the surpluses] was going into reserves and we need to get back putting a large portion of those going into an internally restricted reserve for water and sewer,” says Thomson.
Those funds will go toward replacing the aging systems for water and sewer in the community. That way, the Town will not have to rely so heavily on debt funding or government grants for the projects.
While the Town was advised by Matt Delormes with the Atlantic Infrastructure Management Network that they need to put away as much as they can to help offset future costs. He told them that the ideal number would be $8 million, but understood that it wasn’t always possible to reach that number.
Thomson says they will not be able to put that amount of money away, but they are now taking conscious steps toward building their reserves.
She says there are many small towns across the country that are in similar situations, as aging infrastructure hasn’t been at the forefront of anyone’s minds until problems are starting to occur.
“It’s not just a municipal problem,” says Thomson. “It’s a provincial and federal problem as well.”
Thomson says that after World War II, there was an infrastructure boom across Canada, and many smaller communities were able to expand. This means that most of that infrastructure is coming due around the same time, and the municipalities are going to be looking toward the provincial and federal government to help with the costs of replacement.
