Culvert City: Moving water around Abbotsford eats up millions of budget

It’s expensive to move water around BC’s geographically largest municipality.

Earlier this month, Abbotsford passed a new budget for 2024.

Cities spend most of their operating budgets on their police and fire departments. But when it comes to the capital side of each budget—the amount spent not on ongoing expenses like salaries but on actually building things—most of the money goes to three areas: parks/recreation/culture; roads and transportation; and water and sewer infrastructure.

And in Abbotsford, local officials and politicians have made that last unsexy category a particular priority.

You can see the budget yourself here.

Parks

The spending on parks and related facilities brings the most obvious joy, so we’ll start there.

The city will spend around $2.3 million to design and construct neighbourhood parks.

The city will also spend

• $600,000 on washrooms

• $350,000 on splashpads

• $250,000 on playgrounds

• $300,000 to replace turf fields

• $220,000 for picnic shelters in parks

• and $250,000 to plan and develop sports courts.

Almost all the money for park improvements comes not from taxes or reserves, but from other sources—most frequently fees charged to developers.

Taxes will, however, pay for three new park-related hires—a park planner and designer, an urban forest planner, and a recreation co-ordinator. They’ll all make between $100,000 and $125,000.

The budget also has a bonus for users of the Matsqui Recreation Centre, where a boost of $42,000 in 2024 will keep the weight room open another five hours each day. The MRC’s pool will also get a new play area. At both the MRC and Abbotsford Recreation Centre, about $150,000 will be spent replacing equipment.

Elsewhere in Abbotsford, the city is spending $26,000 for more summer camp programs.

Roads

Abbotsford will spend $4.4 million to widen a short stretch of Old Yale Road at the base of Eagle Mountain. The road will be widened between Old Yale’s junctions with Cameron Drive and Eagle Mountain Road. The stretch, due in part to its location on a steep hillside, is the only two-lane length of Old Yale Road in the area. The city also plans to add a path along the road for pedestrians and cyclists. You can see a conceptual design for the project here. Most of the money for this project is also coming from non-tax and non-reserve sources.

Taxes will finance a different set of roads set for re-paving. Abbotsford will spend $5 million resurfacing some of the city’s busiest roads— including South Fraser Way (from Ware to McDougall) and Maclure Road (from Clearbrook to Trethewey). You can see a full list here.

The city will also spend millions of dollars trying to quiet the trains that pass through town—and make various rail crossings safer.

The city will continue with its ongoing “whistle cessation” program, which seeks to improve railway crossings around the city so trains aren’t required to blow their whistles each time they approach. (Cities bear the cost when the railway predates the road at the site.) Abbotsford will spend about $4.4 million on the crossings next year, but the money is all coming from non-property-tax sources—chiefly a federal program that provides funding for such projects. Another $4 million will be spent upgrading rail crossings.

Intersection improvements (almost all paid for through developer fees/non-property-tax means) are also slated for:

• Marshall Road and Martens Street — traffic signal — $800,000

• George Ferguson Way and Babich Road — traffic signal upgrade — $600,000

• Maclure Road and Gladwin Road — intersection improvements — $1.25 million (another $1.5 million is budgeted for next year)

• Marshall Road and Queen Street — intersection reconstruction — $275,000

As usual, the city has also set smaller sums of money aside for new sidewalks ($600,000), crosswalks ($475,000), bus shelters ($50,000) and bike lanes ($400,000). Another $100,000 will go to its traffic-calming program for things like speed humps designed to slow cars down. This year, Abbotsford has also allocated $450,000 to building a crossing for the Discovery Trail over Highway 11.

One budget entry that stands out is $350,000 allocated to the second phase of Abbotsford’s Fraser Highway widening project. That sum won’t get Abbotsford far. Instead, it’s for preparatory planning work. The real work is anticipated to take place in 2027, when the city has budgeted $20 million to actually widen the next stretch of road.

The water

Human transportation is often front of centre. But a huge part of any municipality’s job is moving water of all sorts around a city of 160,000 people.

Drinking water needs to be delivered to people—and sometimes pumped from the ground. Waste water must be transported in the opposite direction. Water falling from the sky—or arriving in Abbotsford via rivers and creeks—must be accommodated, in one way or the other.

The average citizen may be most focused on street level intersections and infrastructure like traffic signals. But just out of sight, every city is full of intersections involving vital water infrastructure.

Hence budget items like the $750,000 Abbotsford has allocated for “rural uplands culvert replacement.”

But road-drainage junctions are just one part of the equation. Abbotsford will also spend $6.35 million outlay from its reserves to replace culverts along Gladys Avenue and the Southern Railway line. That’s about $40 from every Abbotsford resident just for culverts in 2024.

The city will also be spending around $350,000 to improve the drainage of Clayburn Creek and $200,000 for drainage in the Willband Creek area, along with another $350,000 for a new master plan for city-wide drainage. Another $1 million will be spent to study Clayburn Creek’s drainage.

On the other side of town, the city will remove sediment from Fishtrap Creek’s detention ponds. That will cost a half-million dollars of taxpayer/reserve money. And on Sumas Prairie, the city will spend $1 million to overhaul the station’s pumps and another $325,000 to replace the Lakemount Bridge

The wastewater and sewer costs keep coming. Upgraded drinking water pipes? $1 million. Valve replacements and additions? $250,000. An entire new water master plan? $350,000. The refurbishment of a power line at the Norrish Creek water treatment facility? $3.15 million. Sewer upgrades on Wheel Avenue? $345,000. Designing other sewer improvements on Gladys Avenue? $300,000.

Come winter, the water falls as snow, which requires a whole other species of infrastructure. This year, the city will spend $185,000 on a new salt shed and $200,000 on a “heavy duty shop walkway” for the public-works yard.

Finally, there are the big-ticket drinking-water items. The city plans to spend $10 million this year on the first phase of work to build several new wells for a new water source. That will lay the groundwork for $71 million of budgeted construction next year.

Meanwhile, at Abbotsford’s and Mission’s joint wastewater plant along the Fraser River, the city will spend $5.7 million on replacements and renovations to keep the facility operating smoothly and residents’ liquid—and not-so-liquid—waste from creating smelly problems elsewhere in the city.

Abbotsford will also spend another $430,000 on a study on the “recuperative thickening of biosolids.” Recuperative thickening may be less gross than it sounds. Apparently, it is a technique that allows recycling a portion of “digested solids” to create biogas that can be used to power a wastewater facility. (“Digestive solids” sounds like a euphemism for poop but the digestion actually relates to digestion within wastewater processes, not your own digestive system.)

Finally, Abbotsford must also figure out how to adapt as the amount of water hanging around the city changes. Hence $150,000 that will go toward developing a climate resilience strategy. (Abbotsford budgets an equal amount each year for projects to reduce greenhouse gasses.)

The tech

Underlying all the projects is the City of Abbotsford itself, and the infrastructure, equipment, and people needed to run a city.

Just keeping the city’s information technology from crumbling—and getting it into the hands of people that need it—costs a ton of money.

The city will spend hundreds of thousands to replace and upgrade computers and other information equipment. The city will spend $250,000 to replace desktop PCs for employees, $100,000 to upgrade a network, $70,000 to update its LiDAR technology from 2020 to 2024, and $43,000 to upgrade wi-fi access points at city hall.

The city will also shell out $20,000 on a “large format scanner” for building permits and licensing, and $25,000 to replace other printers around city hall.

Other departments are getting new hires, including a financial analyst who will cost about $145,000, a senior manager in the development planning department who will cost around $190,000, a business analyst who will make about $130,000, and an IT support co-ordinator costing about $116,000.

Finally, there’s one more important item in the budget that addresses a long-called for need.

Abbotsford plans to hire six new firefighters—a considerable increase in a city where the firefighters’ union has long called for more staff. Those firefighters will cost a combined $469,000, or around $78,000 each.