A visibly angry Sinclair Harrison blasted the Saskatchewan government last week after learning only $23 million will be available for rural roads this year.
The president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities had earlier said $56 million was the acceptable minimum.
What they got was $20 million in old money and $3 million of new funding.
“I sat down, and our people sat down, with SUMA (Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association), the department of highways, municipal government for the last nine months at the instruction of government to come up with a comprehensive plans for roads,” Harrison told reporters after the March 19 budget address. “We did that in good faith. We might as well have sat at home and cultivated our fields.”
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Moments before, Harrison stopped premier Roy Romanow in the legislative building rotunda.
“I said I wasn’t happy and we’d better talk,” he said of the brief conversation.
SARM planned to survey its members before a March 27 board meeting, when an announcement will be made about the association’s next move. That could include demanding a share of unallocated surpluses from crown corporations, he said.
Municipal government minister Carol Teichrob said she understood why rural government was unhappy, but added the province has to be cautious about spending money on grid roads because of changing traffic patterns due to rail-line abandonment and grain elevator consolidation.
The extra $3 million in funding will come through rural revenue sharing grants.
“It’s $3 million more than the urban municipalities got,” she said.
Highways minister Judy Bradley noted her department’s budget allocates $22 million to upgrade rural highways affected by changing grain hauls and agricultural diversification.
“We think that’s not sufficient, either,” she said. “We still look again to the federal government to help us on the national highways but also on the grain transportation issue.”
Saskatchewan Wheat Pool president Leroy Larsen, who had called on the government to make road repair a top priority, said he hoped there is a plan to repair the infrastructure.
“We will be pushing the government hard to get on with that program as quickly as possible,” he said.
Keith Lewis, a Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association director from Wawota, also said the government should have spent more on roads.
