180 | BusinessWorld | August-September 2014
Adding staff and restructuring roles within
municipal departments has helped the
district cope, Roycroft said, but the biggest
advantage amid the growth phase is the
staff 's inherent lean toward efficiency.
“On a per-capita basis, we move a lot of
water and we have a lot of roads to
maintain,” he said.
“We move almost as much water as the city
of Kelowna, and we have a service
population of 10,000 while they have a
service population of 65,000. That creates
some real challenges for us in terms of
funding our infrastructure, because we're
taking that burden without as many people
paying into it.”
Buchholz said an asset management plan
was completed in 2010 that both assessed
existing infrastructure and began the
planning process of what will be needed to
address future population growth. He said
the study suggested the district's water and
roads infrastructure were each being
underfunded by $2 million annually, while
the third gap revolved a dearth of inventory
knowledge about the local drainage systems
– let alone a status report of the conditionof
those systems.
A subsequent water master plan in 2012
addressed the infrastructure gap in water
and established an $80 million capital
program over the next 20 years, which
necessitated a bump in annual water rates
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