More than water: Calgary infrastructure woes putting pressure on city hall

deuce ruinous tube ruptures feature lay Calgary’s water system under a microscope, but Evan Spencer sees a bigger problem.

The pair of Bearspaw feeder main breaks 18 months apart has led to greater scrutiny of how Calgary manages its drinking water, especially after an independent report was released this month. Unclear oversight and years of deferred maintenance were cited as factors in the 2024 break, in a system further weakened by leaky pipes.

But it's not just in the water where Spencer, the former Ward 12 city councillor, sees red flags. He sees it in Calgary’s roads and public transit, all compounded by Calgary's population boom.

In 2024, Spencer gathered an estimate from city administration of what it would cost Calgary to simply maintain its infrastructure at its current level. He called for a vote to cover the $480 million in new spending through tax increases over the following three years — to better maintain streets and sidewalks, recreation facilities, public transit and parks.

The idea was shot down nearly unanimously by council, but Spencer now says he accomplished his goal to put more attention on Calgary's infrastructure needs, a growing issue over generations of leadership that he said sought to offer a high quality of service while maintaining a low cost of living. 

“We’re selling a promise we can’t afford to keep right now.”

Calgary’s projected infrastructure gap was estimated to be more than $7.7 billion in 2020. That figure represents the value of unfunded infrastructure investment needs in the ensuing decade. Spencer expects an updated figure will be brought to council this year, and that it will be significantly larger.

A recent report on the risks the city faces found 11 per cent of Calgary’s total infrastructure is in poor or very poor condition.

But doing the work to fix existing infrastructure that is sometimes invisible and often taken for granted can be difficult to communicate, says University of Calgary political science professor Jack Lucas.

“There’s not a lot of people campaigning for mayor on a platform that’s relentlessly focused on water,” said Lucas.

"Most of the time, it’s the hard work that leads to no visible event [that's] success. There’s no pipe exploding, there’s no power outage. It’s a little hard to explain in those cases, ‘Here’s what I did for you over the course of the last four years.’”

Many of the criticisms hurled at Calgary’s drinking water management this month apply across the utility, said Angus Chu.

The University of Calgary civil engineering professor argues the city’s rapid growth has put more strain on Calgary’s water demand, and its wastewater system needs more resources for its upkeep.

Specifically, he points to updated toilets that have been effective in saving water. The trade-off is with less water transporting sewage materials, it's creating more sour gas oxidizing into sulfuric acid that can eat away at sewer pipes. Chu says he’s seen pipes growing thinner, leading to significant cave-ins, and it’s a problem he’s not sure how to solve.

“That’s a sleeping giant for the City of Calgary for the near future, because of the fact we are using significant water-saving fixtures in our houses,” said Chu.

Aging infrastructure one of Calgary's top risks, report finds

He added it’s also led to significantly more odour complaints in Calgary over the past 20 years.

Chu added that more severe storms hitting Calgary is putting pressure on a storm-water system largely designed more than 50 years ago. He said the city has been introducing mitigation efforts to filter out materials it doesn't want to end up in the Bow River, but the work is becoming more urgent as one-in-100-year weather events could hit more frequently.

One area city council has already identified for improvement in recent years is roads.

Calgary has invested for years to try to improve its road network that has pavement quality that falls far below the national average. Freeze-thaw cycles, excessive road salt and more cars on the streets are all leading to cracks, potholes and other deterioration.

Charmaine Buhler, manager of construction and materials in Calgary's mobility business unit, says these problems have been compounded by a lack of funding in the past.

“It all does boil down to investments. We have been chronically underfunded for a long period of time. That is the thing with assets: you have to continually invest,” said Buhler.

A 2024 report estimated investing $132 million annually over 10 years would help Calgary's road quality match the national average, and an $88-million annual investment would at least maintain its current quality.

The city hasn’t matched that total, but Buhler said council has invested more in recent years to counter the degradation of major roads.

Her department plans to advocate for more funding in this fall’s budget to avoid roads crumbling to the point where they need to be rebuilt, which she estimates can cost six to nine times more than repaving, while being more disruptive and not providing a longer lifespan than repaving would.

Compared to a scene like 16th Avenue N.W. Flooding with rushing water after the Bearspaw break, Willem Klumpenhouwer says public transit doesn’t tend to fail catastrophically, which creates a challenge in its own right.

"You don't have this sudden burst that happens and all of a sudden the transit system doesn't work,” said Klumpenhouwer, a public transit research and data consultant.

He said bus and train systems tend to "sort of slump" if they're not properly maintained or funded. 

“It’s almost a bit more precarious because it’s easier to ignore.”

Klumpenhouwer argues Calgary’s Routeahead is a great 30-year plan to guide transit development. The problem is transit is usually funded piecemeal in one-off decisions, he said. Without stable, consistent funding, long-term planning becomes more difficult, and Klumpenhouwer said this can lead to frustrated riders losing trust in transit.

But he argues improving transit is relatively simple. It requires more operating money for more service and more buses.

“They’re all fairly simple fixes. They’re probably not as complicated as trying to replace an entire water main,” said Klumpenhouwer. 

“We know what the issues with the service are, and it’s simply that there’s not enough of it, and that can be fixed with funding.”

Chris Jordan, Calgary's manager of transit service systems, said a four-year plan will be sorted out in budget talks this fall, as well as how to plan public transit for a city that could soon grow to two million residents.

He estimates roughly 20 CTrain vehicles are due for replacement, but even with funding approved for the new cars, it's not a quick fix.

"The challenge is hiring staff, procuring vehicles,” said Jordan. "It can take up to 18 months, for instance, to procure a new bus, so it does take time for those investments to materialize in the field for our customers."

He points to equipment for signalling, power systems, communication lines and the CTrain track itself that are all aging, which the city is addressing. He highlighted Calgary's work downtown to improve the CTrain track as an example of major ongoing maintenance.

While the Bearspaw breaks have hit Calgary particularly hard, Federation of Canadian Municipalities president Rebecca Bligh said they're illustrative of how every Canadian city is having to come up with money to update or replace aging infrastructure.

“What you’ve been through in Calgary is terrible, it’s stressful. It seems like something that just should not happen in a major Canadian city. And yet, it is becoming the trend, not the exception,” said Bligh.

In Vancouver, where Bligh is a city councillor, there were 84 water main failures in 2024 alone.

Municipalities own about 60 per cent of the country's infrastructure, but their revenue is mostly constrained to collecting property taxes, which Bligh said is archaic. She argues that as other levels of government want to see more development, like nation-building projects and housing, municipalities need more fiscal tools to cover costs.

"There has to be a recognition that you can't build a home if you can't flush a toilet," said Bligh.

"While wanting to reduce those development charges, there has to be a balance so municipalities that cannot carry debt for operating are kept whole."

In Calgary, Spencer sees conflicting pressures when it comes to funding for infrastructure, with only so much money to go around. But he thinks the conversation needs to shift from how to keep life cheap to how to fund a better future, and he's hopeful council will become more proactive in this regard.

“Sometimes you just need a crisis before things change,” said Spencer.

“It’s a much bigger problem than this water system and the need to fix this pipe right now. It’s a much bigger problem, and I really hope that council wraps its head around it.”

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