Municipal investment in infrastructure

Later this month residents in Ontario will have the opportunity to go to the polls and select their municipal government representatives.

While anyone who visits social media or watches the news will be able to tell you, there is a deep polarization on any number of issues when it comes to voting in elections at any level in recent times,  I would like to take a moment to talk about the one thing that I hope residents of condominiums will be able to agree upon…

It is becoming increasingly necessary or municipalities to invest in, upgrade and repair important infrastructure!

Here is something that you may not have thought of before: The lack of investment in infrastructure is starting to cost condominium owners money.

In recent months in the city of Toronto, Ottawa and Windsor [as well as many other municipalities] there have been severe storms that have caused flooding and property damage due to the failure of municipal infrastructure to cope with the new environmental realities that we are facing.

Those storms and the property damage they caused were left to property owners to deal with through their insurance companies. Those insurance claims, some of them in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, resulted in increased premiums to the condominium owners and condominium communities that were affected. Down the road these condominiums could also face increased deductibles, or in the worst-case scenario even the loss of the availability of insurance, as a result of the severity of these claims.

It would be unfair to lay all of this at the feet of municipalities, and there is no doubt that the cost of upgrading the infrastructure to accommodate increases in population, and deterioration over time, will have to be shared by municipal governments and by the developers who are building these communities to meet the growing demand.

In short, I would like to encourage those who are planning to participate in the elections this month to ask the question of their local candidates… “Are you in favor of investing in upgrading our city’s infrastructure and do you have a plan to start these improvements in the near future?”

This is just one of the very real issues which affect condominium communities, and individual owners that need to be talked about,  and those discussions need to lead to very real actions in the very near future… or condo owners may start to feel the financial impacts.