This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Michel Durand-Wood’s blog, Dear Winnipeg. It is shared here with permission. All images for this piece were provided by the author, unless otherwise indicated.

The proposed annual budget for Winnipeg, Manitoba, has been released, and the first thing it made me think of was Elmwood Park’s gardener.

If you don’t know it, Elmwood Park is a small neighborhood park near my home. It has a sandbox, an aging wading pool, a swing set and play structure, a couple of benches, and an open area that can serve for pickup games of soccer, outdoor movie nights, or winter skating.

Like many places in the city, it is definitely looking a little worse for wear, a result of decades of neglect from municipal budget cuts.

Many of the structures are nearing, or well past, the end of their useful lives. The lighting is insufficient, and there are often weeds, garbage, and overgrown brush.

But many of my neighbors pick up garbage there on their daily walks, or spend time during the summer pulling weeds, planting community gardens, and adding public art. It’s where children play and dogs are walked.

As a park, it’s pretty unremarkable, but it’s ours and we love it.

But for nearly 60 years starting in the early 1900s, Elmwood Park was a shining gem. My next-door neighbor, who has lived here since childhood in the 1940s, remembers it being a common location for people taking wedding photos.

No doubt because, until the mid-1960s, the park had a full-time gardener who maintained it, and planted up to 1,200 flowers every spring. The park also had a lily pond and fountain, a lot more seating, and amenities such as barbeque pits.

It was picture perfect, worthy of a postcard.

And just so you don’t think I’m exaggerating, here is a literal postcard from the 1940s featuring Elmwood Park.

I know, right? Hard to believe Elmwood Park used to be that nice.

But more importantly, that it wasn’t the only one.

A 1941 transportation map from the Winnipeg Electric Company had this to say:

Large parks such as Assiniboine and Kildonan are well-known but there are many other smaller parks distinct in their own special attractions, which are not so generally used by the citizens at large. A corner of one such park is pictured here. This quiet lily pool is in Elmwood Park on the banks of the Red River at Glenwood Crescent… There are scores of other small parks all within easy reach by street car or bus.

You read that right. Scores. Scores!

If Abe Lincoln has taught us anything, it’s that a score is twenty. And our city once had, not one score, but multiple scores (with an “s”) of small neighborhood parks that looked like this. Maybe not four score and seven, but scores, nonetheless.

The point I’m trying to emphasize here is that while this might seem outright luxurious to us today, there was a time in our city’s history, which lasted many, many decades, when we could afford this. We could afford to pay staff to make even our small neighborhood parks breathtakingly beautiful.

And we continued to afford it through a World War, a global influenza epidemic, a general strike, the Great Depression, a second World War, and a flood of the century.

But then in the mid-1960s, all of a sudden, we had to start letting go of our park gardeners. What gives?

Well, those of you familiar with Strong Towns’ concept of the Growth Ponzi Scheme will recognize that the mid-1960s is about when all the new infrastructure that was built with the first round of car-dependent development started needing maintenance.

Turns out roads are super expensive to maintain. And building a city where everyone can drive everywhere for every trip requires more roads than those people can pay for.

But instead of learning that lesson, we just cut some services. After all, gardeners are nice to have, but not critical to our city like roads are, right? And so we doubled down on even more horizontal expansion, further increasing our ratio of infrastructure per person.

We know what happened one maintenance cycle later. Catherine Macdonald’s 1995 book has an entire chapter titled “Hard Choices: The Eighties and Nineties”:

The necessity of funding these development schemes while also maintaining other needed services caused the city to dig itself badly into debt. At the end of the eighties, the Parks and Recreation Department found itself faced with some difficult challenges.
—A City at Leisure: An Illustrated History of Parks and Recreation Services in Winnipeg, by Catherine Macdonald. Chapter 14.

Hard choices. Difficult challenges. We’ve been using these words with respect to our city budgets for so long, before a lot of us were even born, that it has become normalized to us. New budget, new budget cuts. Every year, we pay more taxes for fewer services.

And this is normal.

It would be wrong to blame the COVID pandemic. It may have accelerated the decline, but it didn’t cause it. This was happening well before then. At least since we were forced to lay off the gardener at Elmwood Park.

*Some of the city’s pre-pandemic financial decline.*

Our biggest challenges are short term and especially on the operating [budget] side.
— Mayor Gillingham, during the latest election campaign

So then why is it that every year that I’ve been alive, we have had to make new cuts? How is it that, despite 150 years of consecutive balanced operating budgets (as is mandated by Provincial law), and despite a growing population, we can afford less and less with each passing year?

The reason is bad choices in our capital budget, because what we can afford in our operating budget is a direct result of what we’ve done in past capital budgets. Think of the capital budget as an investment account. It’s where we make investments into our future.

But investments can make money, or they can lose money. It’s time to admit that our investments have been money losers, and that we need to start learning from those mistakes.

One of this year’s proposed investments is $2.8 million to advance planning and design for the Chief Peguis extension and expansion of Kenaston Boulevard, as a first step in a “Trade Corridors” renewal strategy.

Adding more roads.

But if more roads meant more prosperity, surely we’d be feeling it by now. We have three times more roads per person than New York City. Are we three times more economically productive?

Maybe the Big Apple is a bad comparison. Let’s use a few Canadian examples, then.

We have 20% more lane-km of roads per person than Edmonton, and while our Net Financial Position per person is negative $1,164, Edmonton’s is positive $2,364. And Ottawa has 10% more lane-km of roads per person than we do, and their Net Financial Position per person is negative $2,551.

Clearly, more roads do not necessarily equal more economic prosperity.

Seems like something we could clear up by “completing a return-on investment/business case study to confirm the economic value of the projects,” as Candidate Gillingham had promised last September when he was seeking our vote. We didn’t get a study, yet here we are proposing to spend nearly $3 million on design work for a pair of projects we haven’t even confirmed the economic value of?

Doesn’t sound too fiscally responsible. It almost makes it sound like all this vague talk of “trade corridors” is ideological, rather than financial.

And that’s problematic because road patterns have a long-term impact on a city’s finances, since once road networks are established, they tend to change very little over centuries. Roads are basically the herpes of infrastructure investments: once a road is built, it stays with you forever.

So, if this is a bad investment, then we are making a massive, expensive, irreversible, generational mistake.

Because of the long lifespan of roads, mistakes we’ve made 20, 30, even 40 years ago haven’t had their full impact yet. That’s going to be felt in future operating budgets, which are already going to be strained by our negative Net Financial Position.

As a reminder, the simplest way to explain the relevance of the city’s Net Financial Position being negative $883 million is to understand that it means we’ve already pre-spent nearly $1 billion of future revenue that we’re going to need to find in future operating budgets.

So, put those two together, and more service cuts, or tax increases, are coming. It’s unavoidable, baked into the process by our previous generation of mistakes.

Given that the worst is yet to come, we need to make absolutely certain that every investment going forward is a winner, in order to at least dampen the effect of the inevitable coming decline, if not overcome it completely.

If this was really about improving our trade routes in order to improve our economic status, we could simply set aside an existing lane on Kenaston for commercial traffic only. We could do it this weekend, with only some street paint and a few signs. Same results, but small, cheap, reversible, and quick.

As for the site of the Chief Peguis extension, it’s currently an empty field. Hard to argue it’s a critical trade route when literally no one is traveling there.

And claiming that the widening of Kenaston Boulevard is critical to the success of the Naawi-Oodena development at the former Kapyong Barrack site also seems odd. Maybe someone can explain to me the math behind how making it easier for people to drive past Naawi-Oodena without stopping is good for its economic success…

The bottom line is this: continual road expansion is a big part of what got us here. Worse even is that decline is not felt equally by everyone. The generations of service cuts and decline have taken their toll on our most vulnerable neighbors. And it’s gotten to the point that it’s impossible to look away.

Some prominent Winnipeggers have called it a humanitarian crisis. Others have been even more blunt:

At a time when people are living in bus shelters, it is criminal to spend this much money on transportation issues. It doesn’t make sense to me.
— Jim Silver, professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg’s urban and inner-city studies program

For years, balancing the operating budget has been a shell game of moving money around. This year, we’re proposing to transfer $15 million from the Water & Waste reserve to the city’s “rainy day fund,” effectively using money we’ve set aside for water and sewer maintenance, and using it to plug an operating budget hole in the future, or as is more likely, an operating budget hole this year, given that we’re budgeting only $36 million for snow clearing. We’ve not spent that little on snow clearing for at least five years. Where’s the money for that inevitable overage going to come from? The Water & Waste capital reserve—erm—I mean, the “rainy day fund.”

Those kinds of shenanigans are only going to get worse as the capital budget mistakes of our past start to catch up with us. The way forward is to stop making those mistakes, learn from them, and start making better choices today.

We’re over our heads with the roads we have.
— Councilor Janice Lukes, chair of the Public Works committee

If the roads we built in the past didn’t create enough economic activity to pay for themselves, not even close, then the way forward isn’t “more roads.” We shouldn’t need a cost-benefit analysis to see that the Kenaston/Chief Peguis projects are unqualified losers. Some of us did that math years ago already, for free.

But if we must, then let’s do one before we drop even one red cent, let alone $2.8 million, into the design and planning of one of the largest mistakes of our generation.

Because the sooner we can move onto other, more productive avenues, the better. I’d like to see a gardener in Elmwood Park again in my lifetime.