2005 article predicts onset of NE transportation woes

This editorial piece appeared in the Calgary Herald on June 10, 2005.  It presages the recent developments concerning the so-called 96th Avenue Underpass, the recent sod-turning for a huge development in the Stoney Industrial zone, and the unhealthy competition between urban and rural municipalities to attract development -- and hence tax revenue.  The first elements of the crisis predicted to emerge in the piece are now in place.

Not that I'm in favour of the underpass.  Yet poor planning has led to a circumstance where without it, chaos is sure to emerge.  I'm sure city staff must have known that the runway expansion was coming and that no funds were being directed for an underpass.  Perhaps it's why staff advised council NOT to approve the Stoney Industrial rezoning in 2005.  These compounding factors will lead to gridlock in the north east and another need to apply another band-aid to a problem that should not have existed in the first place.

The thing is that the problem we are now creating will only be solved in the future by hugely expensive retrofits that will cost future residents hundreds of millions of dollars.  The further we go along this track, the harder and more expensive it will be to fix it.

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Handcuffed into the future 
Calgary Herald: June 10, 2005  pg. A22

Within the space of a week in May, city council approved the Stoney industrial development and announced property tax hikes amounting to 15 per cent over three years. At the time, not much was said to connect these two events, but I think they are intimately linked.

The decision on the Stoney industrial development was taken just days prior to the announcement of the rate increases. Against the advice of city planners, council gave the go-ahead for the development of an industrial park north and west of the airport and adjacent to Deerfoot Trail.

When fully built in 2035, Stoney is expected to be an employment centre for 30,000 people, all of whom will either have to drive their cars or take inconvenient public transportation to work. Since the existing road network is ill-equipped to deal with the expected volumes of traffic, the result, planners warn, will be perpetual gridlock. But, in the name of saving economic development from escaping to Balzac and Airdrie, council voted to approve the development. Bowing to criticism, council agreed a review of the decision should take place after 15 years.

The results of that review are not hard to predict. Given that the bulk of the trips to Stoney will be by car (since no mass transportation connection is being planned and where bus service is inconvenient at best -- try taking transit from Ranchlands to Foothills Industrial) and that no improvement to the local road network is being planned between now and then, the findings will likely confirm the warnings of the planning department.

And, it will be today's city council that will have lumbered future ratepayers with the costly consequences of the Stoney decision and handcuffed future councils into having to figure out how to fix them. Higher taxes anyone?

But the offloading costs to unborn citizens has always been a favourite tactic of politicians who are able to benefit from the short-term economic gains their decisions bring without having to consider any of the ultimate costs. Usually, political careers are long over by the time the problems stemming from particular decisions appear.

There is no free lunch, ever. Somebody somewhere always has to pay. Take today for example.

Calgarians continue to be shocked and dismayed by rising property taxes. Construction and road congestion resulting in inconvenience and delay is the new normal.

The document that has had the most influence on the current structure of the city was the 1979 Calgary Municipal Development Plan (MDP) whose main legacy to the development of Calgary was a policy called "balanced growth."

Balanced growth was designed, supposedly, with the goal of making the most efficient use of existing resources while, at the same time, keeping housing prices as low as possible. The tactic used by city hall to keep house prices low was to have a large supply of developable land available in every quadrant of the city.

While there were definite economic benefits to this approach, over the longer haul it has turned out the goals of efficiency and low housing prices were contradictory. Housing prices were kept relatively low, but lack of density drove up the cost of providing municipal services. Building all the roads, buildings, businesses, bridges, neighbourhoods, parks, utility corridors, monuments, arenas, railroads, shopping malls the way we do it is terribly inefficient. In effect, taxpayers are not getting the best bang for their development buck.

This inefficiency is reflected in today's property tax increases.

Even 30 years ago, when the process for creating the 1979 MDP began, other options that would have had much lower lifetime costs were given short shrift in favour of those that brought the most economic development the fastest.

It would be hard to believe the 1979 city council was not aware of eventual costs it was passing on when it adopted the balanced growth strategy. For even then alternatives that favoured elements of what would today be called "smart growth" -- compactness, transport oriented and mixed uses -- were on the table for consideration and planners were well aware of consequences that balanced growth would have on the long-term costliness of the provision of municipal services.

Equally, it is hard to believe that today's council is not aware of the same fact in relation to the costs that will eventually be borne by ratepayers 30 years from now who will have to fix the problems arising from the Stoney development decision.

In both cases, the connection between the actions of today and the costs of tomorrow has been ignored by the respective councils.

To the politicians in 1979 the threat of high development costs was merely a prediction. To us, the ratepayers of today, it is history.