Osoyoos Lake

Image Credit: Contributed/Neil Bousquet

Osoyoos pushed its infrastructure to the limit, and now taxpayers are paying the price.

The Town of Osoyoos has finalized its five-year financial plan, showing it will need massive increases in property taxes and utility fees.

Municipal property taxes are going up by 37 per cent, water fees are up 146 per cent and sewer fees are going up 117 per cent. The average Osoyoos property owner will be paying, approximately, an additional $1,500 a year.

For the past several years Osoyoos has kept taxes low, but is now facing a critical water and wastewater infrastructure deficit.

Rod Risling, the town’s new chief administrative officer, says municipalities face pressure to keep taxes and spending low so often local governments will push infrastructure to its “outer limits.”

“I’ve only been here a year so I can’t elaborate on past practice. There is always pressure on a municipality to do things and keep taxes low. It certainly has come to a bit of a crossroad the last couple years,” Risling said.

READ MORE: Osoyoos residents are in for massive tax hikes

The town was operating with discounted taxes for several years, saving taxpayers approximately $800 a year. The decision to keep taxes low and stretch infrastructure to its breaking point is a significant contributing factor to the infrastructure deficit and tax increase.

“It's always prudent to take a longer term look at the entire infrastructure which is what was done. Now we have a framework or a financial plan to address this critical piece of infrastructure," Risling said.

"As far as the past I can’t speak to that but there is always pressure. Municipalities always have more needs and wants than can be paid for but this has kind of hit a wall and it is absolutely critical to the town’s existence and this is where we’re at."

In the spring, there was a failure of a wastewater treatment cell because of a buildup of sludge causing an odour in the surrounding area. The treatment cell had not been maintained for ten years.

Risling said these cells can go years without needing to be maintained, and cleaning the sludge would not have guaranteed that the cell wouldn’t have died.

“As far as doing regular maintenance, sometimes you try to go as long as you can without having to do some things. It would have been nice if that one was cleaned earlier. But could it have still died if it was cleaned? Yes. Like everything else with a municipality you do try to sometimes push the outer limits a lot of times, and in this case it died and there was no choice we did have to dredge it,” he said.

The town was only made aware of the infrastructure problem this past year when it commissioned a consultant to do a full scale evaluation of the state of the town’s infrastructure. Risling says the town makes the best decisions it can with the information available.

“Over the last year we’ve put a lot more emphasis on asset management. We’re looking at our assets to determine the state of them, the age of them and the cost required to repair and or replace in their proper life cycle,” he said.

Risling was unable to comment on why this evaluation did not take place sooner, but he did say there have been complaints about the water in Osoyoos for years.

“We have, over the last few years, received a lot of complaints about brown water and the lack of availability for people to water their lawns when they want to. We’ve gone down to one day a week watering cycle,” he said. 

Water pumps, pipes, wastewater treatment and more need to be repaired or replaced and it is going to take years.

“It’s going to take 20 years to replace the pipes in the ground that should have been replaced today. So this ongoing funding deficit was incorporated into our taxation model to ensure that we can replace these pipes,” he said.

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