In “Cold Water: Growth Analysis Undercuts infrastructure Expansion Plans,” (The Times, November 1), Rick Conroy writes, “It was a sobering message from the managing director of Watson & Associates….population growth and new homebuilding are likely to fall well short of the forecasts driving the current infrastructure renewal.”

He continues, “According to Watson, instead of adding almost 40,000 people to the County, as forecast in Shire Hall’s current study looking at a regional water system, the entire County population is projected to grow by fewer than 9,700 people over the next 30 years.”

According to Mr. Conroy, Shire Hall and Watson & Associates are working with two different sets of numbers. Population growth will be less than a third what Shire Hall has forecast. The economists have thrown “cold water” on all the waterworks expansion plans, the basis for which, as he writes in a Comment in the same paper, “is now just a pile of rubble.”

All of this is excellent grist for Mr. Conroy, who wants Shire Hall to “just press pause” on its plans to expand our existing waterworks infrastructure to accommodate both current and projected users, not just in Wellington, but across the County.

Yet the same firm supplied the numbers for both Shire Hall’s waterworks expansion plans, and the regional growth study to which Mr. Conroy refers.

There has been no sudden change, in other words, in the growth forecast for Prince Edward County. There are no new numbers.

The confusion is understandable. There is nothing so trying as an array of Council reports framed to answer different questions. I spent a good chunk of last week with the Development Charges Background Study of December 2022, the Prince Edward County Growth Study of April 2023, and this latest, the Hastings/PEC Regional Growth Analysis of October 2023. I retired, at the end of this pile, to a good, deep glass of red. I deserved it.

What does change across these reports are the growth scenarios. The Watson reports present low, medium, and high growth trajectories. These differ. A lot.

Watson’s regional forecast, as reported in the Times, did suggest lower growth projections than those offered at the various waterworks public information centres held this summer in Wellington, Picton, and Bloomfield. That is because in its forecast, Watson presented a medium-growth scenario.

The high-growth scenario, which Jamie Cook noted at last month’s council meeting was one “I would defend, it’s a plausible scenario,” more than doubles the medium-growth projections. Where Watson’s medium-growth scenario forecasts 4,620 housing units over the next 30 years, its high-growth scenario forecasts 12,106. The former means about 10,000 newcomers. The latter about 26,000. Quite a difference.

As the County’s waterworks engineers explain in their servicing plan, they rely on the higher growth projections because they must plan for a system that will last for at least fifty years. Going high ensures capacity, and that the system can be expanded to meet perhaps unprecedented demand.

Mr. Conroy further states: “According to Watson’s analysis, if history is a guide, the region that includes Prince Edward County, Belleville, Hastings and Quinte West may not grow at all. Cook’s presentation indicates that if historical trends are to be relied upon, the population will be flat until 2041 and then drift slightly downward.”

There was nothing in Mr. Cook’s presentation at Council on October 23 to suggest that historical trends can be relied upon, or that this region would experience no growth until 2041. And nothing whatever to suggest a drift downward after that date.

Instead, Mr. Cook stressed that history, in this case, is not a guide. “When I look at the structural elements and changes in demographics across this region,” he said, “I have not seen a situation like what we are seeing in my career. I’ve been at Watson 25 years.”

In fact, Watson & Associates’ Regional Growth Analysis was designed to examine the forces behind what Mr. Cook calls the current “high growth pressure” in the County and across the region, a pressure that seemed to begin with the pandemic. “We wanted to take a deeper dive,” he explained , and rightly, as it turned out. The economists found the high growth phase we are in started in 2015-16, 7 or 8 years ago. It identifies four major reasons behind this shift.

First, high prices in the cities are driving people further afield. If that migration started well before Covid, it has only increased since. Second, the urban exodus has been enabled by remote work arrangements, which are not going anywhere. Third is Canada’s rocketing international immigration. International and provincial migration combined have produced five times the historical rate of net migration to this region. Finally, the local economy is strong. New jobs are everywhere, in manufacturing, the service sector, construction (all those new homes) and in the new EV plants in and around Bath. By 2051, Watson estimates 17,000 new jobs across Hastings-Prince Edward. 27 per cent of those, 4600, will be right here in the County.

As a result of these combined forces, the local population has been climbing since 2016. If from 2001 – 2015, growth was flat, in the last five year period, between 2016-21, the growth rate averaged 1.3 per cent a year.

1.3 per cent may not sound like much, but that is a high growth rate. An annual 1.3 per cent increase to a population of 27,000 equates to 350 people a year. After three years, that is well over 1000 people. Mr. Cook did not say that growth in the County would flatline for 20 years. Quite the opposite. He said the County would experience an average growth rate of 1.1 per cent annually. That’s the medium scenario. The high is 2.4%. Every year.

And what can the municipality do to accommodate this growth? Mr. Cook advised us to “provide housing, work with developers. That’s a real necessity to attract labour to this region.”

What does housing need?

Waterworks expansion.