Hamilton summit - predictable funding needed

In an attempt to increase awareness and find solutions to the mounting financial pressures it faces, the City of Hamilton brought together industry experts to explore ways the city and province can expand the municipality's financial tools and ease the pressure.

The Hamilton Summit 2018, held April 13, brought together MPPs, residents, and city staff and councillors to hear the challenges the city is facing, particularly with the costs of building and maintaining its infrastructure. According to Hamilton finance and corporate services general manager Mike Zegarac, maintaining the city's infrastructure in a state of good repair reflects a $3.3-billion deficit.

Hamilton public works operations director Betty Matthews-Malone told NRU municipalities have a "relatively limited toolbox" when it comes to financial resources to address their infrastructure deficits.

While partnerships are essential, she stressed the importance of long-term predictable agreements between the province and municipalities in funding infrastructure.

"The partnerships have to be permanent, they have to be predictable and they have to be stable," she said. "If it's a lottery system, it can be very difficult."

She added that while great work has come through partnerships with the provincial and federal level, permanency to funding infrastructure remains an issue for municipalities.

"Initially in my career, I spent most of my time building new infrastructure, at the tail end of my career, I'm spending most of my time taking care of that infrastructure that we built," she said.

Zegarac agrees. He suggests extending user fees to include stormwater as one initiative to help address the deficit. He also says the province should upload social housing the same way it uploaded Ontario Works Benefits and the Ontario Drug Support Program.

Another option, says Matthews-Malone, is to leverage partnerships with universities to find innovative solutions to infrastructure challenges. For example, McMaster University's Faculty of Engineering and McMaster Institute for Transportation and Logistics recently partnered with the city on a two-year research project to improve Hamilton Street Railway's customer service.

She added that municipalities also need to embrace and leverage innovation through technology.

"It presents a tremendous number of opportunities to do things a little bit differently," she said.

One small example, she says, is the technology that is used on city snow plow equipment. This relays information on how much salt and material has been put down, providing staff with information on application rates.

"We have a certain [funding] allocation of which we can invest back into infrastructure," Matthews-Malone said. "What technology allows us to do is [improve our data], if we have better data, we can make better decisions. It isn't just a matter of saying the typical road lasts 25 years-we may have, through the use of technology, better information on [things such as] the pavement condition and the responsiveness to drainage."