Editorial: New infrastructure comes with sticker shock

The amounts are eye-watering.

$1.4 million for a new fire truck. $13.5 million for a new city hall. $10 million for city hall upgrades. $500,000 for an accessible washroom. $379,000 for a new garbage truck. $2 million for a field house. $10.1 million for wastewater treatment. $48 million for an RCMP detachment. $85 million for a new high school. $1.5 billion for a new hospital.

These are the kinds of numbers facing local governments as they consider infrastructure purchase or building.

Anyone that has themselves looked at doing renovations or building in the last few years will commiserate with officials over the ballooning costs of seemingly everything associated with construction of any kind.

Projects that used to clock in for municipalities at six figures are now routinely seven and eight figures or more. Purchases of equipment that used to tally in the tens of thousands are now in the hundreds of thousands, and the wait times to actually receive them can easily run more than a year.

The thing is, there’s no sign that costs for these things are going to go down anytime soon, so putting off necessary work generally only makes matters worse. The City of Duncan can decide not to get a $10 million new roof, facade fixes, and seismic upgrades for their historic city hall, but leaving the building to gradually fall apart just means more money down the road than if they’d spent it now.

As North Cowichan staff pointed out about that $1.4 million fire truck, it will cost an added $86,000 if they wait.

And we’ve watched the field house project at the Cowichan Sportsplex shrink in size and rise in price over the years it has been in the works.

So Ladysmith residents should consider, as they look at the Alternative Approval Process underway for $13.5 million for a new city hall, what the consequences will be in the long term if they fail to act now.

Twenty years ago local governments were still talking about costs to taxpayers for things by way of the then average $200,000 home. Those days are gone.

But we cannot allow our communities to fall apart around us. So the Town of Lake Cowichan must spend $10 million to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant, because if they don’t the consequences on the environment and drinking water would be dire, and the Cowichan Valley needs a new hospital.

It also means, however, that our elected officials must be prudent with the choices they make for the future of our communities.