Quote:
Originally Posted by optimusREIM
I think a big part of the problem is that as time goes on and more maintenance is deferred, you get more imperfections in the road surface.
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I don't think the main issue is how much we spend now, it's how much we spent in the past (or lack of spending) that has lead to a massive maintenance backlog. For a city our size, the road maintenance budget is MASSIVE believe it or not.
In 2023, Winnipeg budgeted
$180 million for new streets and street renewal or $230 per person. In the same year, Calgary (the golden poster child for a revenue-rich municipal budget) budgeted
$187 million for new streets and street renewal, or $132 per person. That means we spend 74% more per capita on streets here in Winnipeg compared to Calgary. This is probably the ONLY municipal budget item where we outperform other major Canadian cities on spending, and its a true reflection of the voter bases' civic priorities.
Every social media platform that has Winnipeggers on it do nothing but complain about the state of our streets, especially in spring time when the potholes emerge. But I don't think we truly understand how much we spend on just fixing what roads we have compared to other cities. Part of this has to do with playing catchup from the 1990s to end of the Katz era in 2014 when road spending was virtually flat to accommodate property tax freezes/decreases during that time. I think the roads budget during that era maxed out around ~$30 million IIRC? So now after the addition of several major suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s and their associated street renewal costs coming due, we've pumped up our roads budget to the detriment of almost every other municipal service.
Winnipeggers need to face reality that we will always have potholes on our streets. We will never have all our roads near-perfect condition given our climate, geology, and fiscal constraints. I have suspicions that fixing our roads is no longer an issue of money but local labour and equipment supply. If we continue to crank up road expenditures like we have in the last 10 years, we will soon hit local capacity to repair roads and just end up paying more per unit of fixed road instead of seeing more work done.
I say its time to level off the amount of potholes we try to fix each year and shift some of our civic priorities to other, more impactful areas of our city.