Province to blame for municipal hardships
Comment
by Chris Simon

The residents of Cookstown should be very pleased by last week's provincial funding announcement.

Essentially, the Innisfil Public Library Board applied for $2.85 million in funding for the Cookstown library and community centre project, which is scheduled to be built on the old Cookstown Agricultural Fairgrounds, in February. The provincial government, in turn, approved the entire amount.

The Cookstown project is one of over 240 applications that were approved for initiatives across the province, as part of a $450 million infrastructure investment package.

Perhaps board chair Lillian Owen said it best, suggesting that Cookstown residents should be dancing in the streets with excitement. And it's hard to find anything negative about this announcement.

However, this project shows just how close municipalities like Innisfil are to financial hardship. Without this funding, the project would have been scaled back. In fact, architects had already drawn up plans to take out a washroom and other basic amenities. With the construction of a much needed New Town Hall and the Innisfil Recreation Complex, the debt is already becoming burdening. Add to that the multi-million dollar reconstruction of Innisfil Beach Road and budding issues like a GO Transit train station, Innisfil Heights development and other growth issues, and it's easy to see why there's a need to look for cost savings in large-scale projects like the library.

It's not necessarily the town's fault. Many of the projects listed are necessary and imperative for a growing municipality. Each can be fairly justified. And continued double-digit tax increases aren't the answer.

Although the province should be applauded for funding the Cookstown project, along with many other urgently needed infrastructure initiatives across Ontario, that level of government is largely to blame for the current financial restraints on municipalities. The property tax base should be a last resort for funding, as it was before the provincial Conservative government of the mid-1990s. Theoretically, provincial funding involves taking money from a larger pool of resources, thereby lessening the burden on a small percentage of the population through municipal tax dollars.

But provincial downloading of health care and other services forced municipalities to take on more fiscal responsibility. It's put many municipalities in positions where they can ill afford to ask their taxpayer for more money, even though many provincial jurisdictions are experiencing high growth. Many are forced to take on high debt to pay for infrastructure improvements, costing each municipality millions of dollars more in interest rates.

The provincial government is moving in the right direction. But provincial politicians need to solve the cash crunch faced by several municipalities, by shouldering more of the servicing burden; it would free up more money for vital local projects.

And municipalities could decide where to spend their money, without having to wait for the Ontario government to decide whether a project is worthy of a funding grant. Even then, there's no guarantee the province will fund the project in full.

Without some breathing room, residents could be suffocated by property taxes for years to come.