Terrifying. Staggering. Chronic underinvestment. Urgent repairs.
If you have read the recent news about Niagara Region’s catastrophic infrastructure situation, peppered liberally with the doom-and-gloom phrases above, you likely walked away feeling pretty pessimistic about the future of our property taxes. After all, a 7.72 percent tax hike, every year for the next decade, just to fix the tubes and pipes and pumps, didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence. Then factor in the annual 2.5-ish percent annual increase just to cover the salary raises for all the Niagara Region employees, and we’re basically looking at 10 years of 10 percent property tax hikes.
The good news is… actually there was no good news. It was just bad news followed by worse news followed by disaster-level news.
A water treatment plant in Decew Falls needs $195 million in upgrades; a pumping station in Niagara Falls needs $43 million in repairs; a Welland water facility needs $43 million in repairs; in total, 44 percent of all Niagara Region water infrastructure is listed as being in “poor condition,” and 80 percent of all staff in the water department are assigned to “urgent repairs.” The cost to fix this infrastructure armageddon is going to bankrupt every taxpaying citizen of Niagara by the end of that 10th year.
There is a quick fix though. As always, I have to come to the rescue and am here to clean up this mess for everyone.
The difficulty here, of course, is how do you fix all the busted infrastructure without financially overburdening the local taxpayers?
The answer is: you don’t. You let it all burn. Let every piece of infrastructure crumble away, because by the time the entire system collapses, we’ll all be dead and gone. Not our problem then, is it?
That’s how we got here in the first place. The Boomers put all those pipes in the ground, and all those pumps in the water stations. But they didn’t wanna pay to fix and maintain it. They wanted low property taxes. And they got it. Boomers enjoyed decades of artificially low property taxes while the tubes and pumps slowly deteriorated.
We’re basically looking at 10 years of 10 percent property tax hikes
And now that they are in their twilight years, and nearly done using them, Boomers don’t feel like they should pay to fix that stuff. Fair enough. But we — the “we” here being my generation, aka Millennials — we, don’t wanna pay to fix this stuff either. We didn’t put those pipes in the ground in the first place, so why are you telling us to fix it?
Nah, nah, nah, don’t put this on us. The Boomers opted out of paying for the upkeep on the pipes, so on behalf of the Millennials, I’m giving notice that we would like to take that same option and also not pay for it, please and thank you very much.
All the Boomers did was put all that infrastructure in the ground, spend decades profiting off the booming economy without having to shoulder the burden of paying the infrastructure repair bill, then right around their retirement age they destroyed the housing market for the next generation by quadrupling prices, making themselves wildly wealthy off their house money, and then headed for the emergency exit sign right around when it came time to pay the bill for the pipes that connect to the aforementioned house they sold for a 900 percent profit margin.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing, I tell ya. But the Millennials would like to go ahead and do the same thing. Over to you, Gen Z, because we’re not paying for these busted up, janky, rotting pipes and water plants either.
Good luck with all those repairs. Hope you guys know a good plumber. Oh wait, none of you went to trade schools, there are no Gen Z plumbers. Whatever, not our problem.
James Culic also doesn’t know any good plumbers. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or plumb the depths of your soul and roto-rooter up a letter to the editor.
