1 in 6 of Your City Tax Dollars is Paying to Fix Old Infrastructure

The real story of our upcoming city budget is that Ottawa has an annual half billion dollar infrastructure deficit. And no plan to fill that hole.

This is the third commentary on the 2025 Ottawa Budget. That budget goes forward to Council for approval on December 11.

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I’m having an infrastructure week, in advance of the upcoming City of Ottawa 2025 budget.

While transit is getting all the attention, I’ve argued that the real story of this budget should be how we are going to pay for aging infrastructure.

We’re facing a shortfall in funding our aging infrastructure over the next decade of half a billion dollars a year, or possibly more.

Below are an article, a video and a podcast that discuss the issue in more detail.

Citizen Op-ed

I had an op-ed published in the Ottawa Citizen, noting that we cannot afford to build any new infrastructure when there is existing infrastructure with spare capacity that we could use first. I encourage you to read that 3 minute article.

City Hall delegation

Earlier in the week, I was at City Hall addressing the Finance and Corporate Services committee on this issue.

(As the first public speaker, I had to start my delegation with challenging the Mayor on two procedural issues. My actual content starts around 2:35:30 of the Committee video below).

That quickly morphed into a discussion around whether we should be building new infrastructure, such as Lansdowne and Tewin, when we cannot afford for the infrastructure that we already have.

Strong Towns weighs in on Tewin

And then, I came across the Upzoned podcast from the US-based Strong Towns team.

They discuss a CBC article on the proposed Tewin development in south Ottawa, starting their discussion with “it’s a horrible, horrible project.”

I agree, and it is great to see influential international voices weighing in on Tewin.

Bottom line

What’s happening in the Ottawa city transit budget is highly problematic. I don’t want to minimize the seriousness of what is being proposed, but don’t let that transit debate distract us from an even bigger issue in Ottawa municipal finance; the lack of a plan for how we pay to fix billions in aging infrastructure.