The roads, bridges, water lines and sewer lines that connect rural Alberta are essential to the province’s residents, industry and economy.

Without a major injection of funding, this critical infrastructure will soon enter a period of accelerated deterioration and more frequent and severe failures, a report says.

Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA), in collaboration with Tantus Solutions Group, studied the condition of the various assets managed by its members.

The cost of restoring every highway, bridge and utility to optimal condition would require an investment of $17 billion more than municipalities currently receive through provincial or federal programs.

“This is a large-scale problem that carries very real risks to rural communities and the provincial economy, and solving it will require more than a few million dollars in additional grants,” said the director. of the RMA, Amber Link, to members attending the RMA convention in Edmonton on Wednesday.

There are many steps municipalities can take to better manage their infrastructure, but there is only one way to get rural communities out of the infrastructure deficit, she said.

“A new temporary funding stream is the only possible tool to close this initial $17 billion gap,” Link said.

The two main sources of funding available to municipalities, the Canada Community Futures Fund and the Alberta Local Government Fiscal Framework, use per capita formulas that rural communities say do not take into account debts in regarding the infrastructure they manage.

Grant Gabert, senior consultant at Tantus, said the “astronomical” deficit figures may seem frightening, but there is a strong economic case for making the necessary investments sooner rather than later.

The methodology used in the report to calculate condition, lifespan and maintenance costs is complex, but the principle behind it is simple: infrastructure in good condition is easier to maintain in good condition, and the more it deteriorates, the more quickly it breaks down.

By restoring the infrastructures studied to optimal condition now, municipalities would spend $5 billion less each year in maintenance and repair costs.

“The payback here can really happen quite quickly. That’s a huge amount of maintenance money that’s needed just to keep us where we are. There’s a potential payback in a little over three years.” , said Gabert.

If those investments aren’t made, “things get a little scarier when we start looking into the future,” he said.

Without intervention, the report projects that by 2028, critical infrastructure in rural Alberta will have an average condition of about 20 per cent and 90 per cent of its useful life will have been consumed.

As it deteriorates, the cost of repair increases exponentially, as do the associated risks.

The report predicts that infrastructure failures will likely increase “in both frequency and severity” in the coming years.

“An infrastructure portfolio already showing signs of underinvestment is particularly vulnerable to risk and has likely already begun to deteriorate rapidly. Without adequate intervention, this deterioration will impact not only the quality of life of residents, but also on economic potential,” the report states.

Link said the scale and complexity of the problem has often been difficult to express due to a consistent lack of data among RMA members, which has also hampered the organization’s advocacy efforts.

“Historically, this lack of data has been used by government or other stakeholders to rebuff our call for greater attention to rural infrastructure needs, particularly based on the use of per capita measures,” said Link.

“If we want to propose realistic and credible solutions to close this gap, it is extremely useful to be able to talk about the scale and intensity of liability, which this project allows.”