YK councillors disagree over late bid for federal transportation cash

“I’m quite frankly exhausted of talking to residents about council’s commitment, and then I come and have conversations like this, and I’m not sure it’s there.”

Councillor Ben Hendriksen voiced his exasperation on Monday as he watched colleagues narrowly defeat his motion to have City of Yellowknife staff apply for federal active transportation funding.

Cash from Canada’s Active Transportation Fund can be spent on anything that involves human-powered movement – cycling infrastructure, trails, that kind of thing. The money comes from a broader initiative that will hand out billions of dollars each year.

But the deadline to apply is February 26, just a few weeks away.

City staff said they had looked through the fund’s rules and the city has no council-approved projects for which applying would be worthwhile. City manager Stephen Van Dine and Mayor Rebecca Alty each suggested that asking staff to rustle something up in a matter of weeks – or even days, allowing for council due process first – would mean adding to an already heavy workload.

Hendriksen and others argued choosing not to try bringing in federal cash – for projects the city is certain to need in the coming months and years – was symptomatic of what they said might be a broader lack of commitment to meaningfully improving transportation infrastructure around Yellowknife.

“You have an opportunity, you pivot, you try to capture it. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, but you don’t get it if you don’t try,” said councillor Rob Warburton, backing up Hendriksen.

The written text of Hendriksen’s motion said projects like equipment to maintain paths in winter, the extension of the Frame Lake Trail, and safe and separated bike lanes on city streets were all projects that are known “infrastructure needs” and could benefit from this cash.

Other councillors, though, said less than a month was too little time to turn any of that into a worthwhile application.

“With administration saying they can’t create a substantive application at this time, we’re just going to be throwing stuff into the wind here,” said Garett Cochrane, who will soon hand the title of deputy mayor to Hendriksen for the next year as part of a rotation system.

“The timeline is just so strenuous that I don’t think we’ll have realistically be able to get this done in a way where we’d be able to get any real funding,” Cochrane added.

“There will be other funding pots,” said Alty.

Hendriksen’s motion will not move forward from Monday’s committee meeting to a full council meeting and a formal vote.

A show of hands on Monday suggested council was tied – enough to kill the motion – with Warburton, Tom McLennan and Ryan Fequet expressing support, while Alty, Cochrane, Stacie Arden Smith and Steve Payne opposed it. One remaining councillor, Cat McGurk, was not in the meeting.

‘Opportunity for real impact’

The background to Hendriksen’s call for the city to apply for more funding is the coming completion of a transportation master plan for Yellowknife.

Councillors who are energized by improving the city’s options for walkers and cyclists have been keen to point to that plan as a chance to make big steps forward, but those steps will come with price tags.

Infrastructure projects of any size are no longer cheap for municipalities and the city doesn’t have a wealth of spare cash to invest, meaning tax increases and federal funding are two of the main ways to pay for anything the city wants to do.

On top of that, anything that gets built must also be maintained, which tends not to attract any federal dollars and must be supported by the city’s tax base.

Most work on the transportation master plan is scheduled for 2025-26. So far, there is little firm sense of what it will contain and which projects it will envisage.

Hendriksen argued the current application window involves funding that can cover up to 75 percent of a project’s costs and must be spent by March 31, 2030.

He contended that in the time remaining before late February, the city could put together enough of a package to at least win some kind of federal funding for active transportation, and would surely have enough time to roll out that funding – and find the remaining 25 percent of the overall costs – by 2030.

“This is an opportunity as a city to leverage federal money in order to have a real impact in our city on something that we have said as a council we want,” he told colleagues.

Hendriksen said turning down the chance to bring in some federal money was “fiscally irresponsible” and ran the risk of losing any access to that cash if the coming federal election delivers a government less minded to pay for active transportation projects.

McLennan, reinforcing that argument, said: “The transportation master plan will require big dollars to implement effectively, and we as a council have said we’re serious about this plan.

“I can read political tea leaves. It’s clear to me that federal funds for active transportation projects are going to be very sparse, if they exist at all, in the coming future.”

‘Diversion from core plans’

Van Dine, the city manager, said staff had studied projects on their books to try to find something that would qualify for this funding – paving, traffic lights and so on – but couldn’t see anything likely to be eligible that could be turned around quickly.

“While this active transportation fund is attractive, I would caution that sometimes moneys that are available and seemingly opportune can create a diversion away from core plans, core priorities,” he said.

“Administration is very keen on finding other offsets to make our dollars go further. I don’t want that to be an impression we’re leaving. What we are saying is, based on the analysis we’ve done, we have no eligible projects that council has had a line of sight on or approved.”

Alty said estimates received years ago for things like trail upgrades were out of date and would need updating prior to any application – meaning those estimates were also likely to increase significantly, as costs have escalated in recent years.

“We can chase dollars all day and we have done that in the past, and it just pulls us all over the place,” she said, arguing that applying for the cash in a hurry, without a carefully thought-through plan, would be putting the cart before the horse.

Hendriksen, though, suggested the city would have had more time to appropriately position the horse had it not blown through a series of opportunities.

The city missed a September opportunity to apply for more flexible funding, he said, and then lost time to internal discussions about his motion, which he argued could have passed weeks ago and given staff more ability to get an application in. (The federal fund in question opened in December.)

Other councillors pushed back.

“We’ve heard time and time again about administration: the workload is overwhelming. I feel some responsibility around that,” said Payne.

“We always keep asking for more and more and more. Right now, I’m not in support of this motion.”

“I don’t want us to be putting more onto their shoulders than they can handle,” said Arden Smith. “It just means something else will have to be removed, unfortunately, and I don’t want to see that either.”