Rural roads

[cowman]

The roads out here are something else this year! Unbelievable!
They are so bad the little gas saver cars are getting hung up on the center bulge in the road!
My neighbor was complaining the other day that it was all this darned oil field traffic...never mentioning the B-train bringing him grain or the manure trucks hauling his hog manure! When I told him the oil companies were shut down for spring breakup, he figured it must be all the oil patch 3/4 tons and one tons!
Whatever! Sure must be nice to come over from Holland and know everything! LOL
I think it was mostly just how fast the frost went out and so much moisture in the ground from last fall? And add to that the fact that the county has the grader contractors on a strict "diet" of only 40 hours a week, no matter how bad the roads might be! And the fact that they can't contract any gravel trucks right now!

[rodb]

Cowman
Some roads are particulary bad this year. The county is going to have to spend some time and get these roads back in to shape. Our road is the worst I have seen it in the last twenty years and for once it hasn't been us or the oil companies that are the culprits.

Got a spit last night and we could use some more to get the veggies and the canola growing.
Rod

[coppertop]

Our county has put an Agriculture Road Haul policy in place.

Anyone hauling manure, silage, topsoil etc. must file a road haul route plan with the county specifiying which range and township roads they intend to use to move product either to or from their farming headquarters.They then must adhere to that haul route.

The county will then ensure that the graders are out to touch up those roads at more frequent intervals than adjacent roads etc.

When this policy was originally discussed the council chambers was packed with people who were livid because the county would DARE do anything that would attempt to regulate the agriculture industry.
The only thing wrong with their approach was that two of the kingpins on council both work in the oil industry and the county makes them get permits to move anything that is considered a heavy load, plus they have to post bonds and pay road damage so asking the agriculture industry to file haul routes was a small request in comparison.

[wilagro]

cowman: Your county contracts road maintenance...right?

Loss of control again. The county should run its own graders with its own employees.

Our county roads are terrible this year as well. No snowcover...frost went down 4 feet as fall moisture contributed to this condition.

Low quality oiled roads are especially soft and frost boils everywhere.

[coppertop]

our county has had the graders out really working the washboard out of the roads this spring. The new direction from council is to increase maintenance on the gravel roads,and council has put the dollars in for a new grader beat etc.
The only drawback is finding equipment operators when the salaries aren't as high as the oilpatch.

[coppertop]

cowman, you have mentioned several times that your county has saved a significant amount of money by contracting their grader operations.

If the service level isn't what it used to be, explain where there is a saving.

The first duty of a municipal council is to ensure that tax dollars are spend in a fiscally responsible manner to provide services for their residents. If the residents are pounding their vehicles into the ground on poorly maintained roads then I suggest there really are no savings !! On a spreadsheet contracting grader operations may look like a saving but if the lack of adequate maintenance means roads need to be rebuilt more often, it will cost more.

[cakadu]

I'm kind of wondering the same thing myself, coppertop. If the graders are indeed limited in the hours that they can spend doing the grading, just where will the priorities lie? Close to the major highways i.e. QEII?

If the level of service has gone down - and it sounds like it could potentially go down even further - then please tell me how the ratepayers have saved anything? Remember, it is not the county's money to do with as they want but rather to do with as is best.

If the roads are as bad as is being indicated here, without having any oilfield traffic on them because of road bans, what on earth is going to happen when the road bans come off and all that traffic is pounding the roads?

[coppertop]

I still maintain that running a county's own equipment with their own operators saves in the long run. The problem now is that any county choosing to contract out road maintenance has likely put their capital dollars into infrastructure vs saving it to purchase equipment if the contracting experiment proved too costly in the long run.

[wilagro]

When local governments privatize services it usually means one thing...they don't know how to do their job and hope someone else will do it for them cheaper and better.

In most cases these so-called contracts are secret and NO follow-up studies to compare the efficiency and efficy of the change.

The tax-payer...that's YOU, trusts their reps to do what is right but often their trust is misplaced when it comes to the granting of contracts.

[coppertop]

In most cases it is the result of a newly elected council wanting to give their buddies in the private sector some work !!!

Our council has gone to the other extreme and are buying graders like drunken sailors only to find out that they can't find operators. They usually bring back the retired operators for part time work in the summer, and to train any new operators as well.

[Horse]

Copertop I love your aligance to your counsul but from my experience over 40 yrs watching county consul it is the old guard that rules not the newbees.

[coppertop]

Hey horse, glad to see you are still alive and kicking, I thought you had to run over by some onery old cow or something !!

Actually, my comment that referenced newly elected councillors was based on experience in our local municipality. We had a large shift on council in the early 1990's, and many of the new council had buddies with contracting companies so the mindset was to sell the equipment and contract out the grader beats, local road construction etc.

They sold a lot of equipment, and paved the road past one of the councillors homes for starters, then contracted out one grader beat which proved to be far more costly than using county owned graders.

Thankfully some of that group were only in power for one term !!!

Most long serving councillors in this area understand the reasoning behind the county owning their own equipment. Horse, I respect anyone who is willing to put their name on a ballot and ask for support in a municipal election, the trouble is that many people run with preconceived ideas of how things should be done on council without having any real knowledge or background in municipal issues.

Municipal politics is a thankless job, and those who are honest, and have the best interest of the citizens at heart are very seldom appreciated, it's far too easy to criticize than it is to become informed.

[cowman]

Now personally I am all for privatization. In fact I believe they never took it far enough! Not near far enough!
The CAO assures me the savings on costs are real. The service...well who knows? How do you compare pre-privatization with today? I would suspect the traffic has at the very least doubled!
The focus of the municipality has to be on the population centers along highway II? That is what is paying the bills! I kind of get a kick out of someone complaining their road sucks when their taxes don't even pay for the maitenance! One guy told me he thought his road should be paved with the high taxes he was paying. I asked well how much do you pay? $2800! Would that pave twenty five feet!
Fact: farmland in this county pays 11% of the revenue. Residential and farmland together pay less than 30%! Guess who pays the rest? You got it...business and oil and gas...and the "business" is all related to oil and gas!
Red Deer county is one of the more progressive municipalitys in the province! They do things different, no doubt? I think the majority of the people think they did the right thing by privatizing some services? Now maybe I am wrong here but I do note the two councillors that were pro privatization were elected with a really strong majority of votes? We like free enterprize down here in Red Deer and don't buy into socialist drivel!

[coppertop]

YOu also have a gong show going with the city of Red Deer cowman and that costs big time tax dollars !!

I don't buy the theory that those who pay the most tax get the most services.All citizens should be treated equally regardless of how much tax they pay, that is why taxation based on assessment is an extremely poor formula for property tax. People who pay the large taxes some times feel they have the right to DEMAND more services, but the reason they pay higher taxes is because they chose to build more elaborate homes !!

I don't agree with you on privatization being a cost saving measure. Health care costs have gone sky high since the health authorities were regionalized and a lot of services were privatized. Hospitals used to run in the black doing meal preparation on site etc. Now in many areas meals are brought in pre-prepared and flash frozen. I bet the cost is significantly higher.

Privatization of liquor stores is another example. We used to have one in most communities of any size, and the government made lots of money. Now we have one on every block, there are more problems with alcohol abuse and the tax dollars are spent to clean up the social problems it causes !!!

[wilagro]

cowman: I LIKE socialist DRIVEL when it makes sense to use it.

Privitization is another scheme to HIDE what it really costs to do a job AND in some cases favors CERTAIN contractors who are connected to local councilors,

I have seen these cozy little situations and have heard of others from county employees.

Perhaps your lily-white county is different, but some others aren't.