Over the past 10 years, eight of the 104 bridges in Centre Wellington Township have been replaced.
But another eight have been closed and put on a wait list for replacement, and township officials worry that infrastructure will continue to deteriorate faster than it can be fixed.
“There’s definitely a funding shortage,” Colin Baker, the township’s managing director of infrastructure, tells CTV News.
“There’s a great need to replace these structures that are closed, and a small municipality like this one doesn’t have the funds available to do so.”
A new study by the Ontario Good Roads Association claims that Wellington County and its townships will have to spend $132 million over the next seven years to repair or replace aging bridges.
“It’s not unlike all around the province. There are lots of bridges that require full replacement, and probably all the ones that don’t require full replacement require some major money spent on them as rehabilitation,” says county engineer Gord Ough.
The county spends about $7 million per year on its bridges and thinks it will be able to weather the storm, but its townships – which have smaller tax bases – may face more trouble.
Centre Wellington can only afford to fix one bridge most years – which means that they likely won’t clear their wait list within seven years even if no other bridges fall into significant disrepair.
So which bridges get fixed first?
“We look at the type of road that it’s on, the volume of traffic. Emergency response times also factor in,” says Baker.
On the county level, the most recently repaired bridge is the Tower Street Bridge in Fergus.
It reopened Tuesday after being closed to traffic for nine months.
