Municipalities looking for infrastructure funding

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It was a key plank in the liberal platform: more money for infrastructure projects. Municipalities say they’ll be holding the Liberals to their promise as they head to Ottawa, hat in hand for money to help them meet their growing infrastructure needs.

They are a common site on the urban landscape, potholes, cracked roads and raised grates. They can cause thousands of dollars in damage to your vehicle and make it unsafe.

“You may not realize it’s knocked your car out of alignment because the controller might be bent or from the impact of the pothole you could have your tires wear prematurely and that can make it dangerous” says Rob Bernacci from Locke Street tire.

Each year the City of Hamilton spends close to 50 million dollars a year filling pot holes and repairing damaged roads. It’s a lot of money but not nearly enough .

Gary Moore is the City of Hamiltons Engineering Director. “If we had to replace all of the roads in Hamilton today we’d be over 4 billion dollars. If we ran a program where we went out to look at a road every 25 years we’d need to spend around 160 million dollars a year.”

That’s three times what is currently being spent and one reason why Hamilton is looking to Ottawa for help. One of the key election promises by the liberals in the last campaign was more money for infrastructure projects such as repairing roads. And that’s welcome news to municipalities right across the country struggling to find more money to meet those infrastructure demands.”

“Whatever it needs to be it can’t really be a single ad hoc, here’s an amount of money for two years it needs to be on a sustainable level” said Moore.

Hamilton won’t be travelling down this road alone. Cash strapped communities across the country have made it known they too will be lobbying for their share of the infrastructure jackpot.