Get ready for a wild winter ride

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After the most recent dump of winter weather, it will come as a relief to many Brockville residents that the city is hiring five seasonal workers to ensure sidewalks are cleared more quickly in snowstorms.

It’s one of two measures council recently approved (the other being the addition of salt to the sand used on sidewalks), that together are expected to drive up the winter control budget by about $145,000 a year.

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In the estimation of our municipal leaders, it’s an added expense of which a majority of taxpayers approve: More spending for an added level of service they want.

But city operations director Conal Cosgrove’s report on the matter paints a broader financial picture, one that is far from optimistic, one that suggests much larger spending increases will be coming regardless of how the public feels about them.

The report notes that increases in actual spending for winter control of roads and sidewalks for the past three years have averaged nearly 11 per cent.

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In 2019, for instance, the operations department budgeted $886,895 for winter control on roads and sidewalks, but the actual spending came in at $1,050,389. When comparing actuals to actuals (rather than budgeted amounts) that represented a spending jump of 7.8 per cent over the previous year.

That follows year-over-year increases of 10.7 per cent the previous year and 13.8 per cent in 2017.

Cosgrove last week said different types of weather events have driven up these costs, weather events that were clearly unexpected and hence drove up the spending.

Here’s where it gets interesting. These past three years of wacky winter weather on city roads represent the same time frame in which rising water levels have wreaked havoc on area riverfront properties and businesses.

It would require a separate column to address the ongoing controversy over the International Joint Commission’s Plan 2014 and its role in these higher water levels, but that time frame seems like more than a mere coincidence.

In fact, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Climate change is causing more moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn increases the frequency of precipitation, often extreme precipitation as seen in Newfoundland within the past week.

At this time of year, that extra moisture increases the odds of weather events that require road and sidewalk crews to work overtime.

And come the spring, it increases the amount of water added to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system, and hence, water levels.

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Again, the role of Plan 2014 in handling that extra moisture load remains to be debated. But the extra moisture has been there, and it has driven up costs across the board.

It’s a topic that has lately been on the minds of Cosgrove and his colleagues in the municipal realm, where civic officials have been talking to each other about how to adapt to this new reality and what it has in store in coming years.

“That’s one of the issues that’s out there, is having some discussion around the weather events and planning for weather events,” Cosgrove told me last week.

That new reality will require municipalities to change their parameters for dealing with such weather. And there is no doubt such a change in parameters will include higher costs.

It may come as a shock to many.

There are still people out there gleefully pointing to this recent spate of winter storms, including record cold temperatures in parts of the country, as evidence that global warming is bunk.

If such people still can’t wrap their heads around the distinctions between overall surface warming, climate change and greater climate variability, my column is likely not the one to change their minds.

But, to tweak the old cliché about the municipal level being where the rubber hits the road, one can say that municipal operations are the area where the weather hits the ledger. There is no luxury here to deny the reality of more variable weather, because the roads and sidewalks are, in fact, snowbound and slippery, and it’s the job of the city operations department to clear them quickly and make them safe.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the budget, and don’t be surprised if those costs continue to rise in the double digits for years to come.

City hall reporter Ronald Zajac can be reached at rzajac@postmedia.com