Ontario Good Roads Association 1525 Cornwall Road, Unit 22 Oakville, ON L6J 0B2 PHONE: 289-291-OGRA (6472) FAX: 289-291-6477 www.ogra.org President’s Remarks taying fresh after 118 years is no easy feat. Established organizations can struggle in their eff orts to remain relevant. In 2012, as President of OGRA I saw fi rsthand the ingredients that are needed to build a vibrant Sorganization with momentum and membership buy-in. At a time when all levels of government are trying to understand and defi ne how an NGO achieves independence and accrues integrity and credibility, OGRA is able to provide a rather instructive example. In addition to being responsible to its members, OGRA has become responsible to all of its stakeholders, not because it has to but because it has wanted to. By seeking active input from a wide array of people and organizations that have expressed interested in our work, OGRA has developed the expertise and mindsets required to meet the many new challenges to its role and relevance. Just after the 2012 Conference, the Standards Council of Canada asked OGRA to participate in a reciprocal agreement with the standards organization in Mongolia. As a result, Joe Tiernay, OGRA Executive Director and I went to Ulan Bataar for a week to discuss standards for roads and bridges. In turn, Mongolian offi cials spent a week in Ontario in the fall seeing fi rsthand what goes into keeping Ontarians moving. Th is past year, I also learned the importance of having an ongoing advocacy strategy. After having boldly taking the position that asset management needed to be mandated in order to access provincial dollars, the Government of Ontario announced its new Municipal Infrastructure Strategy that explicitly embraced this position. Th is program requires municipalities that request provincial infrastructure funding to show how projects fi t within a comprehensive asset management plan. Ontario is providing $90 million over the next three years to municipalities. As a result of this program, OGRA engaged the Municipal Finance Offi cers Association to off er a one day overview on developing municipal asset management plans. More than 600 people attended these sessions. In 2012, OGRA also launched its Academy for Municipal Asset Management. Th is grad level program will foster the knowledge and skills needed to oversee an increasingly complex set of modern municipal infrastructure and capital assets. Established programs such as Guelph Road School continued to succeed with more than 800 students attending. In terms of assuring our member needs were met, I am proud to say that OGRA successfully lobbied the government to amend the Minimum Maintenance Standard (MMS) regulation, which has been used successfully, since 2002, to defend numerous claims against municipalities. Th e speed with which this happened, particularly considering that this happen while the legislature was prorogued, is truly a testament to the political capital that OGRA had accrued. I am also proud to report that the introductory phase of OGRA’s Electronic Procurement Solution for Infrastructure was implemented in 2012. When it comes to working for municipalities no one does it like OGRA. Alan Korell OGRA President 1 Executive Directors Remarks 012 will go down as the year that OGRA went global. In March, OGRA President Alan Korell and I were invited to be part of a delegation to Mongolia. Th e trip was planned by the Standards Council of Canada 2and was part of reciprocal agreement that they have with the Mongolians to assist them in their knowledge and application of standards. OGRA was invited to talk about standards for road and bridge construction and maintenance. While there I made contact through our embassy with a representative from VicRoads, the State of Victoria, Australia’s roads department. Th ey are in Mongolia on a long term capacity building contract, in other words, assisting the Mongolians with their goals of improving the country’s transportation infrastructure. Mongolia is experiencing a boom in their mining sector but their national infrastructure is sorely lacking so they turned to the Asia Development Bank and the Australians for assistance. Th e Australians saw great potential for OGRA to provide training to the Mongolians and so after returning from the trip we went about trying to set something up. With all things international it took a while for things to come together but when they did, it came together fast and just before Christmas OGRA hosted two representatives from the Mongolian Department of Roads. Th e program included some in-class material and some fi eld trips and we want to thank the City of Brampton and DBA Engineering for letting us bring the Mongolians to their facilities and lending their expertise to the program. From our perspective the program was very successful and we have since heard back from VicRoads that the Mongolians returned speaking very highly of OGRA and the program we presented. Will there be more international activity in the future? Only time will tell, but our fi rst foray into this area appears to have been a success. Back at home OGRA had other successes. Our education programs continue to be sought out by municipal public works and asset management practitioners. Our new Academy for Asset Management was launched in 2012 and the reviews were very positive. Participants in the program are working towards our new Accredited Asset Manager (AAM) certifi cation. We set another record attendance at our Guelph Road School last year and there were series of workshops that we presented in partnership with the Municipal Finance Offi cers Association were a huge success. It was, however, not all good news in 2012. Our MIT programs were under-subscribed and we are looking at the scheduling of those courses to see if that might be the problem. All our courses continue to be delivered by a dedicated group of volunteers who take great pride (as they should) in what they bring to the table. Without them we simply could not deliver the quality programs that do. On the advocacy front we were successful in getting the Minister of Transportation to revise the MMS in response to a lawsuit that rendered parts of the MMS useless and we got an extension to the electronic hand held device exemption for municipalities. OGRA end year in the black with a surplus of $165,000 and our fi nancial position remains strong. As we move into 2013 there is a lot of uncertainty. Th ere are suggestions that Canada may once again face another recession; there is a new Premier and speculation that we may be looking at a Provincial election later this year and of course there’s the problem that won’t go away. Our infrastructure is in decline and there is not enough money to fi x it. OGRA will face these challenges head-on and continue to work hard for you, our members, so that Ontario remains the best province in Canada. J. W. Tiernay Executive Director 2 1 Member Services GRA’s member service, Municipal DataWorks (MDW), is a web based data repository that can be used by municipalities to manage all of their infrastructure assets. MDW modules off er users the ability to Ovalue an asset for PSAB compliance; inspect roads and bridges to determine condition and plan for the assets eventual rehabilitation and replacement. Over 300 municipalities made the recent funding program to collect information on bridges a success. Th e bridge assets now in MDW will provide aggregate information on the condition of over 16,000 municipal bridges and culverts >3m span, and make data available to assist OGRA and the province in making informed decisions on the needs of bridges. An amending regulation to Ontario Regulation 239/02 - Minimum Maintenance Standards for Municipal Highways (“MMS”) was signed by the Minister of Transportation in January 2013. Th e amending regulation was required due to a decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Giuliani v. Region of Halton et. al. [2011] ONCA 812 (CanLII). In Giuliani, the Court restricted the scope of s.4 of the MMS to situations only where a municipality ploughed the road, and held that s.4 was inapplicable as a defence where the snow accumulation was less than the depth in the Table to that section. In addition, it was found that the key allegations of fault directed at the appellants were not centered upon failing to treat a roadway after it became icy (after becoming aware of the fact), in the time required by section 5 of the MMS as it was phrased in the original wording of the regulation in 2003. Th e claim was, instead, focused upon failures by the municipality to take reasonable steps beforehand, to try to prevent ice forming on a roadway, which included a failure to monitor the weather and to have deployed resources much earlier than was done to try and prevent the formation of ice. In response, OGRA recalled the MMS Task Force to review the Court’s decision and developed the revisions to the regulation. Th e MMS Task Force also developed/revised Guideline documents as follows: new documents include “Th e Guideline for Weather Monitoring”, “A Guideline for Preparing a Level of Service Policy” and a “Guideline for Training Patrol Staff ”; revised documents include “Guideline for Patrolling Representative Roads and a “Guideline for Preparing for and Decommissioning Winter Operations” Phase 1 of OGRA’s Electronic Procurement Solution for Infrastructure was implemented in 2012. Phase 1 consists of: a plan taker registration that can be made publically available at the users discretion; web posting of the tender advertisement; electronic distribution of tender documents to plan takers; electronic submission of tender documents at bid close; posting of the tender award and; an ability to manage and audit the entire tendering process.